COD 2

ABOUT GAME

Being the little brother of one of the most highly acclaimed shooters of 2003 is not necessarily an enviable position. While it means a certain degree of easy sales, you have a lot to live up to. However, Activision and company were careful not to crank the Hype-O-Meter up too high, choosing instead to talk about the game in small doses; an interview here, a batch of screenshots there. When I got the 6-CD package amid a flurry of other shooters coming out in the same time frame, my initial reaction was mild.(CLICK CONTINUE READING FOR DOWNLOAD LINKS)

 Then I began the install, the music swelled, and all those fuzzily warm memories of ricocheting bullets and constant explosions came back like long-lost friends. Call of Duty, it's been a while. We're glad to have you back.

Like its older sibling, CoD 2 covers World War II across three interwoven campaigns featuring the Russians, the British, and the Americans. However, now you can skip ahead from one faction to another, once you've played through a batch of missions. I personally wasn't champing at the bit to play one or the other, but I guess it's nice to have the functionality there. The game also auto-detects 16:9 and 16:10 widescreen ratios, as well as the funky 5:4 ratio for LCD monitors (like 1280x1024). You'll have a solid selection of performance tweaking options, or you can let the game set what it thinks will be optimal settings. With a 6800GT, 3.0GHz P4 and 1GB of RAM, the game plays quite smoothly at 1280x1024, with anisotropic filtering (to make textures look nicer) and 4xAA (to reduce jagged edges). There were slowdowns when it rained and when there was a lot of smoke on screen, but it was otherwise quite playable with the latest official nVidia drivers. Speaking of those guys, there's also an "Optimize for SLI" toggle, but I don't have the luxury of two hot boards, so let's move on.

Many of you who grabbed the single-player demo noted that the game didn't run all that great. All I can tell you is that the retail version appears to have been optimized. Textures look great, and there's lots of shiny stuff going on. Normal mapping is fairly subtle, except for a few elderly character models who look like they're bathed in a sheen of sweat. It's not quite on par with FEAR, but I think even the hardcore shooter fan will find little to complain about. Most importantly: I saw little sign of cutting corners for multi-platform development (as the game is also coming out on the 360). I'm pleased to report that everything looks quite sharp.

And CoD 2 is about the grisliest game I've seen get the ESRB T rating. There's no blood and guts splashing all over the place, but you will have dying soldiers attempting to drag themselves to safety, only to be bludgeoned to death by a nearby enemy. And they'll scream bloody murder when they die. On the other hand, the only blood you'll see is when you shoot someone, and the profanity stays firmly in PG-13 territory. And there's none of the chunky dismemberment we've seen in Brothers in Arms.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Minimum Requirements

1, 4 GHz Prozessor (Celeron / Duron) 
512 MB RAM 
ATi Radeon 9200 / GeForce 4


Optimum Requirements

2, 5 GHz Prozessor (Athlon XP / Pentium 4) 
1 GB RAM 
ATi Radeon 9800XT / GeForce FX 5900


DOWNLOAD LINKS
(CLICK ON PARTS WAIT FOR 5 SECONDS AND SKIP ADD TO CONTINUE DOWNLOAD)




Part I size: 100 mb








Part II size: 100 mb








Part III size: 100 mb









Part IV size: 100 mb





Part V size: 22 mb