After Activision sent us our press copy, I spent an entire weekend playing through the entire single player campaign. There are 24 single player levels, mostly based around the typical FPS fodder of move forward, shoot some bad guys, move forward again. Call of Duty adds a couple of new dimensions to this formula though.

The first, and most obvious (as it's mentioned on the box) is the concept of teamwork. Call of Duty's single player missions rely very heavily of scripted sequences and non player characters. For the most part you are playing the role of just another member of the squad, and have to provide covering fire whilst other members of your team perform various tasks to complete the level objective.

During the various levels you will also be given orders and objectives by ranking officers on your squad, from placing explosives on Anti-Aircraft gun batteries to providing cover fire using a fixed emplacement machine gun.

If you have played the two demos that have been released you will be aware that the first has you attacking a town, and the second has you defending it from a counter-attack. This sort of event happens a few times throughout the game, from first attacking then defending a bridge as a British soldier, to perhaps the most intense couple of levels in the game.

Playing as a Russian soldier you are part of a squad that has to attack and secure a building. This is a difficult level (and comes very late in the game), and once you have completed the mission - which does involve working through the building floor by floor killing enemies - the next level has you defending the building from counter-attack.

During this sequence you have a number of objectives to complete, including using anti-tank machine guns to physically defending each floor from attacking German soldiers whilst waiting for a timer to count down to when reinforcements arrive (which also signals the end of the level).

AI
It is unfortunate that this area quickly becomes one of the failings when it comes to providing the promised immersiveness. Whilst the enemy AI is very good, and the AI of your team-mates is equally good at following the game script, it rapidly becomes apparent that despite the promises of fantastic team play in the single player game, the enemy AI is totally focussed on the player, often to the exclusion of the scripted NPCs.

It's hard to notice unless you move away from the scripted path, but once you do it become extremely clear - and extremely frustrating. To give you an example, during one mission (British soldier in Norway) my character was coming under extremely heavy fire from a machine gun. The objective was to use a bren gun to provide covering fire to the rest of the squad.

Well, being the inquisitive sort of bloke I am I moved around a bit, and noticed that my entire squad was kneeling in the direct line of the machine gun fire blithely ignoring it - mostly as the enemy AI was focussed on me and was tracking my movements.

You start to notice it more in some of the later levels when you start noticing enemy characters automatically targeting you when they run in to a room, ignoring the NPC team mate who's shooting them, or when you peer around a corner and watch an enemy immediately target you to the exclusion of everything else.

As large portions of the single player game are scripted, it is easy to force errors in the scripting, even to the point of watching five enemy NPCs run straight past three of my team mates in their rush to get to the specific room I was in.

It's not all bad though - the amount of work that has gone in to recreating some very famous sequences from history (and probably more familiar to people who have seen Band of Brothers and Enemy at the Gates) is quite amazing. The gun emplacement sequence from Band of Brothers is recreated fairly well early on in the game, however it is the siege of Stalingrad that is the most impressive.

If you've ever seen the movie Enemy at the Gates, you will instantly recognise the river crossing from the early part of the movie. In Call

 of Duty this sequence is recreated, placing you as a player inside one of the boats crossing the river. If you make it to the other side (there's a place you have to duck - which is your only option at that point - or you will die), you are scripted through another sequence and given 5 rounds of rifle ammunition. The rest of the level involves staying alive and completing a couple of objectives without actually having a weapon.

The attention to detail in the atmosphere in this game is absolutely stunning, right down to a section where as a Russian soldier moving through the sewers under Stalingrad, at one point you come to a section where the roof is exposed and you suddenly see hordes of German soldiers jumping over the gap.

The inclusion of several different types of level (such as the one where you are the passenger in a jeep flying through the countryside or the one where you take control of a tank) makes a change from the normal fare in these sorts of games, though I wonder if the package as a whole has the strength to stand the test of time.

The single player experience is an amazing one - the first time. The second time is not as interesting, even on a much higher difficulty, since you already know what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, and how you can trigger scripted sequences. You find yourself trying to move outside the bounds of the linear game, and the edges start to show.

Co-op and Multiplayer
This game screams out for a co-operative mode, however the developers have stated that to patch the game to include a co-operative mode would take as long to create as the original game itself. This is a real shame, as it places the game squarely back in the same place as Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Medal of Honour - it's now a first person shooter with a multiplayer component. There's nothing original in that, and the multiplayer experience is essentially the same as RTCW or MoH, except that in each round if you die, you have to wait out the round until you can respawn.

So I guess it's sort of like RTCW crossed with CounterStrike.

Summary
Overall this is certainly a game worth playing through at least once. I've not covered the usual bits and pieces you would find in a review of a game like this (weapons, graphics, sound and so forth) as these are all top-notch - but then you would expect that from a modern game built on the Quake 3 engine. However it is precisely because of the quality of these areas that you are drawn to the inadequacies of the scripted parts, and you very quickly notice just how linear the game is, with absolutely no scope for doing anything except playing through exactly intended.

I know it's a harsh criticism, however in a game like this the trick is not to make it non-linear (which would defeat the purpose of the single player game telling an interconnected story over a series of levels) but to hide the fact it is so linear from the player so effectively that they think the entire sequence of events that happens in the game is unique to them.