Call of Duty: Finest Hour Review

I recently heard of this game's existence, I always heard that it was "bad" and not very good but considering I played through some not so good CoD games like United Offensive and 3 and some rather forgettable ones like Big Red One, I decided to give this game a try and what do I think? It's not particularly a great game, I wouldn't consider any CoD game to be that but Finest Hour is kind of fascinating in that it's a console exclusive "follow up" of sorts to the original CoD and this was a year before CoD2 would grace the Xbox 360 and PC. I emulated the PS2 version and it ran fine.

Right away, the first thing that caught my eye where the production values, it surprisingly looks pretty high quality for a console exclusive. Environments look quite nice and sharp and they did a good enough at keeping that early CoD asethetic on the PS2. The gritty and grimey art direction is replicated pretty well here. Everything is all torn apart and destroyed, and the Russian campaign steals the show with it's scenery yet again, as usual in these early CoD games. The sound design is also pretty good and the guns sound pretty meaty, death animations are decent too even if there are some moments where it felt like the hit detection was off especially with precision guns, I headshotted some of them with the crosshair on their head, and it either missed or they shrugged it off.

One big difference between this game and the rest of the CoD games and this caught me by surprise was well, actual in engine cutscenes during missions, where even in the modern CoD games, the cutscenes were usually there to mask load times and they were at the start and end of every mission, and a level is bookended with an NPC talking. Finest Hour however has cutscenes during levels and it caught me off guard, I was just surprised to see a CoD game do this at all. I got used to it but I have been playing CoD games for so long that stuff like this stands out to me, even to the point where I have to dedicate an entire section of this review to it. They are at least decently shot and made at least.

There is also an emphasis on tanks in Finest Hour, you will be escorting them, and riding them from time to time. This might be the most tank heavy CoD game to date. The tank combat is okay, all though enemy tanks take a little too many bullets to die and the once the armor on the tank is gone, the health for it does auto regenerate, so it's hard to get into any unwinnable states. There is lot of tank escort missions but I didn't find these as bad as some people did. Probably due to the following reasons:

I used save states on an emulator which probably bypassed much of the potential frustration I could've had and I played on easy. The checkpoints in the rare instance where I didn't use an emu save state was pretty bad, the worst CoD's ever been. I can see why people who played on the base hardware would've gotten frustrated.

Another big change that even the finite health CoD games before CoD WW2 never did was let you hold medkits, Finest Hour might've predated the first FEAR game in being a mainstream shooter where you can hold healing items. This alone makes the game better to play than United Offensive for me. The final battle of Finest Hour also feels like a proto CoD WW2 as well which is interesting.

After all of this, I'm still rather lukewarm on the game because really, it's a typical CoD game and WW2 run and gun shooter at heart after all these differences. Levels are still very linear with you only being able to go straight and not being able to backwards at any point, this just makes level design patronizing, there's lots of dead ends and not much in the way of anything to find, there's medkits to find, but exploration or the sense that these levels exist just for the player to be funneled forwards and do what the script tells them to do is minimal at best. It's still very much traditional CoD campaign level design despite all the differences I mentioned.

Then there is the shooting mechanics and as usual for CoD, it's just, "ADS, shoot" and watch enemies die where you fight the same enemy infantry soldiers, tanks and occasional planes for the whole game. I tend to judge any game with shooting in it with how much effort it takes to kill a lowly grunt enemy and in CoD, all of the enemies can be dispatched without much effort since they mainly just stand there and move around only when you get close with reloading being the only form of kryptonite the player character has, that and maybe grenades.

Difference here is no regen health, this could potentially make the shooting less about waiting, but health packs are littered inconsistently and so does enemies dropping health, CoD Vanguard gets a lot of shit, but the New Doom styled inspired shootouts in one of the sections of the game is how picture this game in some ways should play.

Overall, game lived up to my expectations, just an okay CoD spin off that you might enjoy more when emulated.