Call of Duty: Finest Hour
CoD hops to consoles. First look and hands-on impressions inside.
Published: October 9, 2004
There is probably no war as rife with raw information as World War II. The combination of documentaries, interviews, and films made all over the world covering the ebb and flow of battle, the see-sawing offensives and struggles for power and position that took place during the course of the war, all of it means there's more information than any one team could put into a game-based tribute, and certainly a film.
Still, that's not stopping the development team (30+ of whom have reformed after jumping ship from EA's Medal of Honor series) at Spark Unlimited from trying to cull data from everywhere they can to make sure the console versions of the game that managed to leapfrog the already-incredible MoH games on the PC will have a fitting home. To this end, they've tapped an impressive amount of talent and expertise to help sculpt the experience of viewing WWII from the eyes of three distinct soldiers.
The men primarily responsible for doling out advice and ensuring that the game is as realistic as possible are retired Army Captain John Hillen and retired Army Colonel Hank Keirsey (though we're not entirely sure Keirsey doesn't randomly fly overseas to kill a couple people alongside our forces in Iraq every couple days or so). Heavily decorated and well-educated, both men have supplied ample suggestion and refinement of everything from troop movement to ensuring that soldiers don't just run around pointing their weapons at everyone's faces (a making-of video we watched at a San Francisco event recently had Keirsey snapping "muzzle control!" after seeing how the troops carried their weapons).
Aside from having achieved impressive ranks while in service, both men pride themselves on being extremely well versed in the history of World War II. This knowledge was plied specifically on highlighting three offensives that took place from all fronts spanning the length of the war.
Campaigns in Russia, where you play as one of the many Russian countrymen simply picked off the streets, armed and then expected to defend Stalingrad against a Nazi assault; Northern Africa, as one of Popsky's Private Army recruits, a motley group of guerilla-like fighters working for the British that regularly assaulted key ammo and fuel dumps against Rommel's Panzer brigade all along the northern border of the Sahara; and then Germany itself as the Americans advanced into the Fatherland after taking Omaha on D-Day.
The three different campaigns will not only present a handful of characters (six in all) that haven't yet been tapped for a WWII game -- selections like the "Black Panthers," the all-black 761st tank battalion and a female Russian sniper -- but serve to specifically highlight moments where the Allied forces were either grossly outnumbered or underpowered, or were simply walking into territory they were completely unfamiliar with and lacked the resources to "properly" put down the enemy.
It's a fantastic way of demonstrating just how utterly courageous these men and women from wildly different parts of the globe really were, how the odds were defied when the Allied offensive regularly ventured into territory that by all odd should have been held by the enemy. It's also makes for some truly cinematic set-ups for the levels, and this, of course, is where the game itself comes in.
Each of the campaigns showcases a particular moment where the tide was turned for the Allied powers, with the Russians repelling the attempted Nazi occupation of Stalingrad, the PPA helping to put the squeeze on Germany's Afrika Korps during the see-sawing battles across Northern Africa, and the Americans advancing into and eventually taking Aachen, Germany, the crux of the Holy Roman Empire, and Hitler's First Reich.
After watching a few making of videos at the event last week, we were given time to play through a select few missions in each campaign. We'll leave individual notes for when we can sit down with playable game code without power failures and presentations interrupting the experience, but we can't resist giving a rundown of the overall experience.
The game itself plays much like any other first person shooter; pressing triangle and circle will raise or lower your stance from standing to crouched to prone, and hitting triangle while you're standing will allow you to make a short hop. R1 fires, holding L1 will allow you to look down your sights (and use the d-pad to lean left and right) and hitting X performs context-sensitive actions like opening doors or swapping out weapons. Finest Hour will offer more than 30 weapons in all, and it's not just in the usual Russian/America/British/German takes on the same pistols and rifles, but a couple of incredibly fun "big guns" that actually let you plant and set up the bipods near the muzzle for some series sprays of lead.
What struck us most about the game was how nicely varied the level designs were, and the sheer numbers of troops available on screen. Early on in the Russian campaign, we saw literally hundreds of troops streaming up hillsides, and in the level we played, dozens would come pouring out of the woodwork to try to retake a position. For the sake of balance, of course, you couldn't have 25 Nazi bearing down on you wile you tried to storm pillboxes and trenches, but the sensation that you were trying to navigate a bombed out, almost free-form battlefield was there.
The Russian campaign also offered the ability to hop into a tank (with independent controls for the turret and tracks as you'd expect, though it did take some getting used to) and storm an airfield, actually shooting down planes that were trying to take to the sky if your aim was steady enough. There are few things as satisfying in a shooter as drawing a bead on a fleeing plane and blowing it out of the sky as it's just about to leave the runway.
Throughout both missions, there was an overwhelming sense that things were bleak. Deep blues and mottled browns were splashed across varying shades of grey. Even in the tank-based level where there was snowfall and things were generally less bombed out and more wintery, there hung a foreboding sense of oppression.
The North African missions were a bit more traditional WWII game fare, offering a rail-shooter section where we got to man a turret and mow down some enemies, a couple vehicles and even a plane or two. It was well-scripted, though when vehicles exploded, you could watch as bodies flew out in pre-determined arcs and then landed feet-first as if made of plastic. Hopefully it's just a case of the physics not being implemented, but with all the attention to detail in the rest of the game, it seems suspect to just have canned death animations.
We didn't actually get the chance to play the American missions, only watch a demonstration of a tank line streaming through Aachen. The tanks could be used for cover from sniper fire, but they needed just as much protection as the ground troops did from Germans armed with panzershreks that would reduce the tanks (and the massive building-penetrating Howitzers attached to them), to mangled metal. In a couple of sequences, the panzershreks were actually turned against Nazis, after the lead character picked one up off a downed enemy, sending the rockets into sniper spots and rewarding all us onlookers with a nice showering of debris and thick clouds of smoke.
If we came away from our time with Finest Hour with anything, it was that Spark really is trying to incorporate a stunning amount of historical data into a game that traditionally only needed the setup of taking place in a well-known historical event like D-Day.
The addition of some deeply knowledgeable Army vets, a solid engine capable of some truly stunning battlefield recreations, and a soundtrack (composed and conducted with an 80 piece orchestra by Medal of Honor music mainstay Michael Giacchino) that pulls that same sense of stirring pride and admiration that Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan (the movie that arguably got all this WWII madness started in the first place) introduced, means that this is going to be one hell of a shooter.
We'll have updated impressions of more of the game as soon as we can get our grubby mitts on more advanced code, but for now, be sure to take a gander at all the screenshots (and later movies) that we walked away with, and keep your eyes peeled for plenty more in the coming weeks.
Still, that's not stopping the development team (30+ of whom have reformed after jumping ship from EA's Medal of Honor series) at Spark Unlimited from trying to cull data from everywhere they can to make sure the console versions of the game that managed to leapfrog the already-incredible MoH games on the PC will have a fitting home. To this end, they've tapped an impressive amount of talent and expertise to help sculpt the experience of viewing WWII from the eyes of three distinct soldiers.
The men primarily responsible for doling out advice and ensuring that the game is as realistic as possible are retired Army Captain John Hillen and retired Army Colonel Hank Keirsey (though we're not entirely sure Keirsey doesn't randomly fly overseas to kill a couple people alongside our forces in Iraq every couple days or so). Heavily decorated and well-educated, both men have supplied ample suggestion and refinement of everything from troop movement to ensuring that soldiers don't just run around pointing their weapons at everyone's faces (a making-of video we watched at a San Francisco event recently had Keirsey snapping "muzzle control!" after seeing how the troops carried their weapons).
Aside from having achieved impressive ranks while in service, both men pride themselves on being extremely well versed in the history of World War II. This knowledge was plied specifically on highlighting three offensives that took place from all fronts spanning the length of the war.
Campaigns in Russia, where you play as one of the many Russian countrymen simply picked off the streets, armed and then expected to defend Stalingrad against a Nazi assault; Northern Africa, as one of Popsky's Private Army recruits, a motley group of guerilla-like fighters working for the British that regularly assaulted key ammo and fuel dumps against Rommel's Panzer brigade all along the northern border of the Sahara; and then Germany itself as the Americans advanced into the Fatherland after taking Omaha on D-Day.
The three different campaigns will not only present a handful of characters (six in all) that haven't yet been tapped for a WWII game -- selections like the "Black Panthers," the all-black 761st tank battalion and a female Russian sniper -- but serve to specifically highlight moments where the Allied forces were either grossly outnumbered or underpowered, or were simply walking into territory they were completely unfamiliar with and lacked the resources to "properly" put down the enemy.
It's a fantastic way of demonstrating just how utterly courageous these men and women from wildly different parts of the globe really were, how the odds were defied when the Allied offensive regularly ventured into territory that by all odd should have been held by the enemy. It's also makes for some truly cinematic set-ups for the levels, and this, of course, is where the game itself comes in.
Each of the campaigns showcases a particular moment where the tide was turned for the Allied powers, with the Russians repelling the attempted Nazi occupation of Stalingrad, the PPA helping to put the squeeze on Germany's Afrika Korps during the see-sawing battles across Northern Africa, and the Americans advancing into and eventually taking Aachen, Germany, the crux of the Holy Roman Empire, and Hitler's First Reich.
After watching a few making of videos at the event last week, we were given time to play through a select few missions in each campaign. We'll leave individual notes for when we can sit down with playable game code without power failures and presentations interrupting the experience, but we can't resist giving a rundown of the overall experience.
The game itself plays much like any other first person shooter; pressing triangle and circle will raise or lower your stance from standing to crouched to prone, and hitting triangle while you're standing will allow you to make a short hop. R1 fires, holding L1 will allow you to look down your sights (and use the d-pad to lean left and right) and hitting X performs context-sensitive actions like opening doors or swapping out weapons. Finest Hour will offer more than 30 weapons in all, and it's not just in the usual Russian/America/British/German takes on the same pistols and rifles, but a couple of incredibly fun "big guns" that actually let you plant and set up the bipods near the muzzle for some series sprays of lead.
What struck us most about the game was how nicely varied the level designs were, and the sheer numbers of troops available on screen. Early on in the Russian campaign, we saw literally hundreds of troops streaming up hillsides, and in the level we played, dozens would come pouring out of the woodwork to try to retake a position. For the sake of balance, of course, you couldn't have 25 Nazi bearing down on you wile you tried to storm pillboxes and trenches, but the sensation that you were trying to navigate a bombed out, almost free-form battlefield was there.
The Russian campaign also offered the ability to hop into a tank (with independent controls for the turret and tracks as you'd expect, though it did take some getting used to) and storm an airfield, actually shooting down planes that were trying to take to the sky if your aim was steady enough. There are few things as satisfying in a shooter as drawing a bead on a fleeing plane and blowing it out of the sky as it's just about to leave the runway.
Throughout both missions, there was an overwhelming sense that things were bleak. Deep blues and mottled browns were splashed across varying shades of grey. Even in the tank-based level where there was snowfall and things were generally less bombed out and more wintery, there hung a foreboding sense of oppression.
The North African missions were a bit more traditional WWII game fare, offering a rail-shooter section where we got to man a turret and mow down some enemies, a couple vehicles and even a plane or two. It was well-scripted, though when vehicles exploded, you could watch as bodies flew out in pre-determined arcs and then landed feet-first as if made of plastic. Hopefully it's just a case of the physics not being implemented, but with all the attention to detail in the rest of the game, it seems suspect to just have canned death animations.
We didn't actually get the chance to play the American missions, only watch a demonstration of a tank line streaming through Aachen. The tanks could be used for cover from sniper fire, but they needed just as much protection as the ground troops did from Germans armed with panzershreks that would reduce the tanks (and the massive building-penetrating Howitzers attached to them), to mangled metal. In a couple of sequences, the panzershreks were actually turned against Nazis, after the lead character picked one up off a downed enemy, sending the rockets into sniper spots and rewarding all us onlookers with a nice showering of debris and thick clouds of smoke.
If we came away from our time with Finest Hour with anything, it was that Spark really is trying to incorporate a stunning amount of historical data into a game that traditionally only needed the setup of taking place in a well-known historical event like D-Day.
The addition of some deeply knowledgeable Army vets, a solid engine capable of some truly stunning battlefield recreations, and a soundtrack (composed and conducted with an 80 piece orchestra by Medal of Honor music mainstay Michael Giacchino) that pulls that same sense of stirring pride and admiration that Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan (the movie that arguably got all this WWII madness started in the first place) introduced, means that this is going to be one hell of a shooter.
We'll have updated impressions of more of the game as soon as we can get our grubby mitts on more advanced code, but for now, be sure to take a gander at all the screenshots (and later movies) that we walked away with, and keep your eyes peeled for plenty more in the coming weeks.
