Call of Duty: United Offensive Hands-On

Here, hold my hand; is it trembling? Am I teary-eyed? I damn nearly forgot what it was like to play Call of Duty.
It’s a good thing then that Activision decided to remind me by sending us the latest build of the upcoming expansion, Call of Duty: United Offensive, in production by Gray Matter Studios (the dudes behind the single-player portion of Return to Castle Wolfenstein). As you know the original Call of Duty was done by Infinite Ward, a bunch of renegade 2015 developers that actually spearheaded (Get it? Oh, I kill me!) the development of the original Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - a game that set new standards for immersive and incredibly intense WWII combat. And just as MoH: AA was a trendsetter, so was the original Call of Duty, raising the bar a notch or two for both the intensity and technical excellence achieved in the sub-genre. So when I first heard that IW would be outsourcing the development of the expansion to Gray Matter, I got a little worried. Notions of the crappy MoH: AA - Spearhead add-on started popping up in my head, and I got concerned that Activision might ‘EA’ the franchise by releasing a bunch of sub par expansions simply to milk more cash out of it.

That's one limp cannon. Is there such a thing as cannon Viagra?

Say your prayers, boys!

Did I mention my eyes are watery right now? And I’m pretty sure my hands are trembling. All my fears were quickly cast away (only to be replaced by a huge rush of adrenaline) when I loaded up the expansion. I have a sweet 7.1 sound setup here at work, with a nice and shiny 24-bit Creative Audigy card, and you can bet that the rest of the AT staffers didn’t appreciate the ensuing onslaught of violent sounds of gunfire and screams of men in combat. But what can I say - it’s Call of Duty, folks! That’s how this one is meant to be played! (Just for the record, I use an ATi card).

For more info on what kind of features and added content will United Offensive bring, I suggest you read our previous preview of the game. For this hands-on report I’m gonna concentrate on the thick, bloody action and the technical aspects of the expansion.

The good news is that the Call of Duty franchise hasn’t lost a fraction of its fun and intensity when Gray Matter took over the project. Infinity Ward laid down the foundation already, so GMS only really had to concentrate on designing nail-biting missions, which they did, and did so quite nicely. As I moved with my US squad through Belgium, I couldn’t help but notice the fluidity and the engrossing quality of the action. The two single-player missions I played so far are fairly large and broken down into several sub segments. The recipe for mission design stays true to the original. What struck me as a very pleasing, (though somewhat subtle) addition, however, is that the missions have been made to appear a lot more coherent as you move from one phase of the game to another. Another aspect of the expansion that I really liked is that although most of the game play is still very much on the rails, there are now more opportunities for you to break off from the main assault group and carry out your own little diversions. Naturally, the plot will progress as you trigger scripted sequences, but as in the original, the appearance of seamless action and realism has been preserved so that you never get the feeling that you’re playing MoH: AA - Spearhead for example (that game being a prime example of a poorly designed expansion with the shoddiest AI routines ever).

Speaking of AI, I haven’t seen any noticeable improvements in the expansion, but what’s there is on a par with what we saw in the original, and that’s good enough in my book.

Possibly the biggest technical improvement in United Offensive are the even better looking visuals. At this point, it’s very hard to believe that United Offensive is running on an extremely modified version of the Quake III engine, but that just goes to show you what hard work and some good programming can do for such an aging technology. I only shudder to think how this game would look and run on a carefully modified and optimized Source engine (seeing how I’m loving how that one works in Counter-Strike: Source). A few of the visual improvements that are apparent right off the bat are the even richer particle effects (making the explosions and billows of smoke look even better than before), and a heavier application of advanced pixel shader effects, which increase the impact of ambient details like light flickering through broken windows, heat haze effect and so on.

I'm getting five hookers when we reach Paris!

I wonder if they sell cheap beer in that pub.

Other relatively minor game play improvements include the ability of your character to sprint (very useful when dodging Nazi bullets) and "cook off" grenades - hold them while the fuse burns so that they explode sooner after you throw them.

Finally, even though the game looks better, I wasn’t satisfied with its current performance. On my rig, which is an Athlon 64 3200+, 1.5GB RAM and ATi Radeon 9800XT 256MB RAM, I would get noticeable frame rate drops during some action-heavy sequences. Granted, here’s the warning I got with the preview build, "The current levels under review are currently being optimized. As such, they will at times have performance issues on lower end systems. We recommend running the expansion pack on P4-2.4 GHz or higher systems with 1 Gig of ram and a 128MB video card." So you can expect that the developers will tweak this baby for performance before it hits the shelves. I sure hope that’s the case.

But, as I said, from what I could see so far, Gray Matter has done an outstanding job, and I only wish that this damn preview build wasn’t level-locked. Look man, my hands are still trembling! OK, time to replay the battle of Neville - damn Nazi dogs are storming our position (you know the drill) and me and the boys must fend them off! HOORAH!!

Smapdey: 2Lions, you trigger-happy idiot, you didn’t tell them about the release date! Or the multiplayer mode!

2Lions: Yeah... thanks for reminding me, ya overzealous freak!