Call of Duty 2

Since the Call of Duty games have always tended to be quite expensive, even years after their release, I decided to pick up the CoD Warchest bundle on Steam, which sold for around S$15.
Previously, from Call of Duty, I’d played CoD4 (Modern Warfare), otherwise known as “the best one”. Ostensibly, the settings in the games are different; since CoD2 is WWII, Cod4 isn’t. They both feature a British man with a ridiculous mustache, though.

IIRC, CoD2 was released in 2005. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was 2003. Unlike modern shooters, MoH:AA wasn’t so bad. With CoD2, you get to see a blend of styles; visually, it reminds me quite a lot of MoH:AA.
It seems, though, that CoD was a popular trend setter. (I’m considering this in terms of Single Player only. The popularity of the multiplayer I think was probaly more important).

Gameplay-wise, CoD2 is very formulaic: shoot the bad guys, and duck for cover when you get shot too much. - So what’s so much worse about this than MoH:AA? Easiest thing to blame is the different health mechanics. With CoD2.. while I did die from time to time, I found that I wondered “what’d be the difference to my gameplay experience if I had God Mode enabled?”. Rather, in MoH:AA, you have to care about your health. If you get shot too many times, you have to play carefully until you can find healthpacks to recover.
Notably, anyway, in the game it’s not uncommon to have to blow up enemy tanks. Unlike pretty much any other WWII shooter I’ve played, where tanks are terrifying, in CoD the tanks are pretty harmless; defeating them is easy even when you don’t have a bazooka: you can just run up to the tank and place an explosive on it.

CoD4 (and BF3) were good at being “interactive narratives”. CoD has this, also. Yet, so much of the time it’s just way too damn hard to understand what’s going on, since EVERYTHING is explosions and noise.
Unlike MoH:AA, it’s common to fight alongside teammates. Sometimes, when the AI is clever enough to progress forward, this means you won’t need to do all the shooting yourself. (In a shooter game, gosh..). Another .. neat? effect of this is that to get ammo for your weapons, you can just wait for a fellow AI to get killed, and you can get their ammo or pickup their weapon.

I guess hating on CoD is common, and that probably applies more to the recent CoD games than the older ones. But issit fun? I guess. It’s cool because of the guns and stuff. But it hardly ever really challenges the player. I didn’t breeze through it, but never was I stuck for any great length of time.
Maybe on the hardest difficulties the experience demands the player to have better accuracy, and to not be out in the open so often, etc. but on default difficulty, it’s not an inspiring design.