War is delightful to those who have not experienced it,” said beardy Dutch humanist Erasmus back in the 1500s. Erasmus didn’t like war back then because war was ugly, featuring misshapen heroes wielding sharpened sticks and peasant children throwing rocks. War today is now a spectacle, a form of entertainment. If Erasmus were alive today and managed to play Call Of Duty 2, he’d probably start clawing at the screen in disbelief. The graphical trickery would be dismissed as witchcraft and the X360 would be thrown into a lake to see if it floats or sinks. Erasmus would be experiencing war and he would be delighted.

So, why would he be so delighted? Well, the simple answer is the graphics; an obvious starting point for this review and easily COD 2’s trump card. Gaming snobs have been endlessly chewing over the gameplay versus graphics debate for longer than anyone cares to remember, but COD 2 has given that tedious argument a loud crack on the backside. If there’s one thing Infinity Ward has learned from Call Of Duty, it’s how to create spectacle. You'll notice straight away how scarily realistic COD 2 looks. Having never been to war, by realistic, we mean that when you go to sleep at night dreaming of man-versus-man conflict and those horrendous stories your grandad told you in-between mouthfuls of digestive, this is what war looks like – chaotic, dramatic and heroic. The bombers soaring overhead, the mud kicked into the air by hand grenades, the errant sniper rounds pinging off the wall behind you – every war cliché is present, correct and looks worryingly real. These cheap tricks to create atmosphere seen in the predecessor have returned, but they’ve now been bolstered with a Hollywoodsize budget to make accountants sweat. War has always been about teamwork, and the COD series has the technological muscle to recreate the feeling of camaraderie. Now the fear of slowdown has been banished to the distant realms of last-gen, you always have fellow troops fighting by your side, no matter what else is happening on screen. When one team-mate slumps to the ground, another runs in from the back to take his place. When you charge off ahead, your men will follow you. The result is a perpetual firefight, with an endless cycle of old soldiers dying and new soldiers running into the fray. Pardon the cliché, but it’s total carnage. Gameplay versus graphics? Sometimes gameplay needs the graphics to realise its potential.

Cynics be damned. When war looks this good, it’s hard to resist the pull and not get drawn in. True, the emotional draw might not be there, so you’re not going to burst into tears when Private Peas takes a sniper round to the skull, but you are going to be angry that your decoy taking fire has died, leaving you exposed and vulnerable. In short, teamwork matters. Keeping your fellow soldiers alive is very important, if only for the selfish reason of having more bodies drawing fire away from your exposed ass.

The feeling of war camaraderie is helped by the soldiers fighting alongside you doing something to help. You’ll see them return fire and use melee attacks to defend their position or mount assaults, actually killing enemy soldiers and clearing a path forward. Stand back and observe and you will see them make a difference. You’ll feel proud. Then you’ll run the other way while they’re taking all the fire.

This brings us onto the gameplay itself. COD 2 still falls under the FPS banner and shares its predecessor’s love of set-piece objectives, such as sniping mortar teams or using gun turrets to fend off German counterattacks. The objectives vary depending on whether you’re ploughing through the Russian, British or American campaign, but the idea is always the same – shoot them before they shoot you. However, there are plenty of differences separating this from the usual run and gun fare. Guns in World War II weren’t accurate unless the soldier you were shooting at was close enough for you to reach out and poke him in the eye. Therefore, in the pursuit of realism, you’re not going to be able to shoot the dots off a die with any weapon in this particular war. There’s no crosshair and while stroking the left shoulder button lets you aim down the barrel of the gun, it still won’t pack the military accuracy of modern weaponry. Throw in the clunky feel of each weapon and it should be frustrating. It certainly sounds frustrating. But somehow, it’s not. There’s no logical explanation as to why it’s not frustrating. It just works. It feels right, authentic even. Better than that is the lack of spinning ammunition pick-ups floating a few centimetres off the ground. If you run out of ammo, you simply grab a rifle from a fallen soldier and carry on. It feels like you’re inventing your own solution on the fly and surviving by the skin of your teeth. You soon learn to mix and match your weapons to the situation – the Kar98’s long reload times makes it suicide in close encounters, while the trench gun encourages pointing and mock laughter from distant enemies. There’s a logical coherence to COD 2, where everything makes sense and feels just as you would expect a real war to feel.

Grenades now play a much bigger role when fighting for survival. The Xbox 360 pads have four shoulder buttons rather than the two of old. This means Infinity Ward has found room to slot two grenade buttons. Without descending into GameFAQs speak, this means you can tap the shoulder button to throw a grenade. Without any convoluted menus, 43 button pressures and an unwieldy inventory to wade through, you’re more inclined to use grenades and with a healthy amount of explosives found throughout each level – again, by raiding the dead bodies of fallen soldiers – you’ll quickly settle into the habit of throwing a grenade, then using the ensuing explosion to take advantage of your enemy’s confusion. Fortunately, there’s a grenade indicator showing you where nearby grenades have fallen, giving you a fair chance to scarper when the odd potato masher is thrown back at you.

That’s one shoulder button explained. The other? Smoke grenades. These are essentially get-out-of-jail-free cards, with the smoke working as a shield to storm any tricky gun turrets. You start the level with four and these usually have to last until the closing cut-scene. It keeps the pace from sticking and stops the blood from boiling. The smoke effects look absolutely fantastic too. It’s one of the rare occasions where a developer can justifiably wave his arms about shouting “volumetric fog!” without being laughed at. Yet another example, we’re afraid, of graphics enhancing gameplay. Fellow developers watch and learn.

Best of all is the new health system. This genuinely makes a difference to the way the game is played. Previously in COD, you had to memorise the locations of past health packs and whenever your health hits critical levels, spend ten minutes backtracking to find them. Funnily enough, digging around rubble trying to find the last health pack only to die anyway wasn’t fun. Now in COD 2 though, when you’re in trouble, you just hide somewhere and then rest up. It's as easy as that. There’s no permanent damage for taking fire, so all you have to do is take cover somewhere and wait for the action to calm down. Your health is indicated by how hard your character is breathing, an easy-to-understand system. As soon as you hear your soldier puffing and wheezing away like Ron Jeremy at work, you know it’s time to take a breather from the action and hide. Remember that hiding from the action while your fellow troops die isn’t cowardly, in COD 2 it’s known as reevaluating the situation and is perfectly acceptable gameplay.

If there’s one thing Infinity Ward hasn’t learnt since COD, it’s how to disguise pre-scripting. Once you slow down and start examining the chaotic scene around you, you can clearly see the seams holding the war machine together. As with the previous COD, there’s an irritating reliance on certain characters surviving no matter what, so they can give the orders/blow up the wall/perform arbitrary pre-scripted events later in the level. Take American squad leader Sergeant Randall. He needs to stay alive to kick down some of the doors in the small French town of Caen, a job you’re apparently ill-equipped to do yourself. He can take tank shells in the face with the only side effect being that he has to shake off the cobwebs.

Sergeant Randall secretly activating God mode when no one was looking isn’t an isolated incident either. The enemy soldier who accidentally blows up the gate blocking your progress can’t be killed. You can only pick up the Panzerschreck when the ‘destroy tank’ objective rolls around. You have to wait for Captain Price to blow up the door to the bunker, even though you have your own explosives. You also realise the freedom you initially think you’ve been granted isn’t actually there either. Broken rubble seals off alleyways, minefields usher you towards the trenches in open desert and impossible inclines create valleys in muddy fields.

COD 2 hasn’t fallen into the runningdown- a-corridor-in-a-single-file trap as badly as the Medal Of Honor series has done, but it is clear that you’re being pulled through the one obvious route available. This is classic funnel-neck level design, which is technical beanpole speak for “it’s a bit linear.” You’ll hit every set piece from the level beginning to end and you’ll feel like a bystander on a rollercoaster, joining the dots as you complete your objectives. Like a rollercoaster, it’s spectacular and it’s fun but you never feel in control.

Inevitably, some people will say COD 2 is exactly the same depiction of war that we saw on the last round of consoles, bar the Xbox 360 paint job and more men on screen. Some people will say that when you scratch away the paint, you can see flickers of a last-gen game dressed up in next-gen graphics. That’s missing the point – COD 2 is proof of how graphics can enhance the gameplay, ramming home the point that THIS IS WAR until you feel violated, ill and homesick like those fighting on the frontline. Then again, some people have not yet experienced this particular war. As Erasmus might say, they’ll be delighted if they do.

Ryan King