Gameplay, Continued
Once again you play a role in the three main Allied sides, British, American and Russian. Each section for each side consists of a number of missions, sometimes explained by a briefing section but more usually by mission notes or personal letters written by your character. Whereas in the original CoD the missions were loosely based around either historical events or movie scenes, this time around everything is based on historical events. As I mentioned earlier, in the US campaign you start off surrounded at Bastogne and play the game up to the taking of the town of Noville. Some might think that stopping the US campaign at Noville and moving on to other areas of the war is a bad idea. However, this is an expansion pack and such was the scope of WW2 that it’d be hard to say where to stop if you just carried on all the time. Noville is generally accepted to mark the end of the Battle of the Bulge, so it’s logical to stop the US campaign at this point and let the other allies get a look in.
So what else do you get to play? Again, we get a welcome break from the usual FPS fare as our first British mission sees us as the engineer/dorsal gunner on an RAF B-17. (Yes, we did fly them for a bit, but decided to stick with Lancasters and Wellingtons in the end.) You start off just pootling along, then you have to progressively do more and more to keep the plane flying as well as fend off enemy fighters until you’re running around like a mad thing. (It’s a small point, but I suppose the inclusion of a B-17 is to satisfy the US market. From a gameplay point of view, the B-17 gives more positions to shoot from, but shouldn’t a great British aircraft like the Lancaster get a bit of the limelight too?)
Eventually you end up working on an SOE team on covert operations in the run up to the invasion of Sicily. In the Russian campaign, you play the part of an infantry soldier, new to the war and follow his progress into tanks and back to the infantry. These levels are more reminiscent of the original CoD, with lots of street fighting, close combat and sniping to be had.
At the end of each campaign you get a bit of FMV summing up everything you’ve done in the campaign before you move onto the next one, plus a brief synopsis of where and how those missions fitted into the war. A nice touch, to keep you firmly grounded in the reality that this was a real conflict.