The tone to expect from the newest Call of Duty game is set on the very first mission. There are 4 separate instances of having to listlessly wait around as your teammates very slowly approach and then open a door. This is seemingly the definitive modern take on the Call of Duty experience - a little bit of shooting that gets in the way of the cinematic story that the game is trying to tell. If the game were to let you play at your own pace, dialogue might be cut off, and the game wouldn’t be able to orchestrate the exact camera angles it wants for its precious explosions.
Call of Duty wasn’t always this way. It was only really the 4th entry in the franchise,COD 4, that the emphasis on the story was given equal weight to the intrinsic gameplay. That’s not to say that story sections didn’t exist, they just tended to be opening or closing set pieces. Stalingrad, the first Soviet mission from COD 1, for all its historical inaccuracies, is still a loving homage to Enemies At the Gate, and is intense and enjoyable to experience even now.
But I’m not here to sing the praises of cutscenes where you can move your head slightly from left to right. Quite the opposite, in fact - I’m going to tell you about a mission from COD 1 that puts gameplay front and centre, without sacrificing any of the bombastic cinematism of the newer Call of Dutys. Let's do a deep dive on Mission 3 of the American campaign: Village at Dawn.
The mission starts with you and your squad occupying Dawnville, bracing yourself for a German offensive on the once idyllic French town. Mortar fire rains down on your position - you scramble for cover to regroup with your Captain. No sooner does the mortar fire end that a tank bursts through the roadblock on the south-east side of the village. The Captain orders you to get one of the captured Panzerfausts from the church to take it out.
As you make your way to the church, the Germans launch their rattack in earnest. They leap over the walls, and flank you from the alley, making even reaching the church a difficult task. As you leave the church to destroy the tank, another wave comes from those same positions and the south. Finally, you clear the troop wave and are able to destroy the tank - but this is just the beginning.
The Germans next attack comes from the West, a direct attack on the church. Captain Foley had the foresight to predict this, and has set up multiple stolen MG42 machine guns to defend this flank. You can defend this position by either jumping on one of these machine guns, or using a dropped FG 42 sniper rifle.
With that flank secured, it's time to go on the counter attack! You are ordered to push the Germans out of the town as their continuous flanking is getting out of hand. You and your squad proceed down the alley and towards the large field to the north-east. You encounter resistance, but are able to effectively clear it out. But then you hear the ominous rumbling of a tank's treadmills.
The tank crashes through the northeastern wall, machine guns blazing. You get yelled at to take it out, but no anti-tank weapons are close by. You need to get back to the church! You run for cover, only to get taken off guard by more German troops, this time swooping over walls from the southern side of the alley. You get through, exiting the small building next to the alley, before BOOM! The tank has crashed through yet another wall, this time right on top of you. Shellshocked, with ears ringing, you manage to stumble your way to the church and take out the second tank. We're not quite done yet though…
In the meantime, the third (and thankfully, final) tank has breached the southwestern blockade. Its quickly dispatched by a fellow soldier opening the hatch and throwing a grenade inside it, but before you can celebrate, another wave of mortar fire drops. The attack has been repelled, but you're not going to sit there and be shelled all day! You head out to take down those mortar teams.
You reach the remains of a broken wall overlooking a field, and before you can blink there are multiple machine gun nests firing hundreds of rounds at you. As you dive for cover, there's a conveniently placed Kar 98 Sniper Rifle awaiting you. You take it and do your best to dispose of the gunners without taking too much damage, sniping one of the mortar teams in the process. With only one mortar team left, you move behind the house they're using as cover and take them out before they even realise you're there.
Village at Dawn is one of the best cod missions I've ever played - period. It's got fantastic variety in gameplay - you defend, you attack, you take down tanks, you snipe. It's got some really good 'shock' moments - when that tank bursts through the second wall, getting lit up with machine gun nest fire towards the end. It's got fantastic pacing, at no point does it ever feel like a slog.
What really elevates it to brilliance though is the constant sense of forward momentum. At no point during this mission are you ever forced to sit around and wait for the npcs to open a door for you. Control is never taken from the player at any point - you're always running and gunning, or at least standing still and gunning. And it's all still recognisably Call of Duty. It's still linear, and scripted, and is about your ability to click on heads faster than you die. This isn't some wild departure from the formulae, it's just executed with an entirely different emphasis from the CODs of today.
The first Call of Duty knew that the spectacle of warfare itself was cinematic enough to provide an engaging experience without ripping control from the player's hands. When you play the old game, it feels like you're a soldier on the frontline (albeit one that's really good at killing). You experience the events as they happen, and they're happening to you. When I 'played' 2019's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, I felt like the game was reluctantly letting me take part in a movie, but only if I followed the exact script set before me. It occasionally let me off the hook to actually play the game, but within 10 minutes or so the leash tightened and I was back to being a passive spectator.
I’ve played a lot of retro games this year. Some have had stories that made be cringe in disbelief. Some have been ugly as sin. Some have insanely non-intuitive controls or a straight up broken camera. But most have something relevant to teach to the modern titles of today, whether it be about the value of challenge, or the joy of simplicity. Call of Duty 1 taught me that cinematic shooters of the present have lost their way. It delivered a fantastic experience by allowing me to have total control of my character as World War 2 unfolded around me.
