Publication Date: 11/08/2025

Call of Duty: Big Red One

Whilst I barely touched Call of Duty as a series prior to owning an Xbox 360, being much more ingrained in the sphere of Medal of Honor (may she rest in peace), the sole exception to that was having a burnt copy of Call of Duty: Big Red One for the PS2. Ah, the days of having a chipped PS2 and a family friend who could, very easily, obtain burnt PS2 games. Good times. Now, at this point it’s been twenty years since I even touched that game, so any real memories are scarce, but I remember enjoying it enough. I think I liked the desert setting of the first section? Anyway, it’s the sole Call of Duty from my childhood, and after the mechanically mixed but tonally, atmospherically fantastic Finest Hour, I was excited to see how Big Red One filled in the issues and expanded on its strengths. Sadly, what could’ve been a standout in the franchise as a whole, sadly does very little to capitalize on the strengths of its predecessor; mechanically, the game is leaps and bounds ahead of Finest Hour, creating a foundation that is far, far more better to actually engage with, but it’s narrative, tone and the overall experience - things Finest Hour taught is really important to this series - of its campaign feeling ridiculously forgettable.

Interestingly enough, Big Red One is the second half of an odd, unofficial duology for the PS2-era of Call of Duty. Seemingly because they couldn’t quite replicate the original versions of the PC games to their full extent, Finest Hour and Big Red One are alternate versions of Call of Duty 1 and 2 with totally different campaigns. Call of Duty 3, on the other hand, roughly holds parity on each different platform.. Personally, I kind of prefer the idea of these reimaginings over an untenable port of a PC title, but that also just comes from my innate love of demakes and whatnot. Just one of those things I’d like to highlight, as I generally hear Call of Duty 2 - the original version - was a genuinely fantastic follow-up to the original Call of Duty. If only Big Red One was that to Finest Hour.

If there’s anything I want to highlight in this review is that I don’t think Big Red One is an inherently bad game; it’s gunplay is as strong, or perhaps stronger than any FPS on the PS2 of that time that I’ve seen, particularly standing leagues above Finest Hour. But even if it’s a series now as commercialized and, dare I say, frequently vapid as Call of Duty is now, I do want to look for what’s the best in a game, what a game could aspire to be. Finest Hour, through all its blemishes, did feel quite special for an FPS of that era, if not for its gameplay, but its more cinematic and tonal elements. Whilst I take question with a lot of Big Red One’s takes on these elements, I want to underline that if you’re looking for a solid FPS, Big Red One will serve you well - it’s just if you want more from your FPS, like I was, this might leave you high and dry.

To start with, I want to highlight where Big Red One succeeds, and where it shines is in its foundational gameplay. Gunplay feels much, much better since Finest Hour - not only does firing pretty much any weapon feel weightier and more satisfying, I generally felt a whole lot more accurate and it just felt ‘good’ shooting through Nazis in this game (as life should be). One of Finest Hour’s biggest problems was its gunplay just feeling off, especially in how weapons would feel inaccurate, either due to actual inaccuracy or just poor feedback, but I ascribe such an improvement due to the developer being switched from Spark Unlimited - with Finest Hour being their first game - to the excellent, already well-honed developers at Treyarch. Manual weaponry like the ever-reliable Garand feel snappy and accurate, and whilst automatic weaponry can occasionally feel a bit inaccurate, that does feel accurate to the times itself and any deaths that resulted from said inaccuracy is very likely in my own head. This foundational element of Big Red One - of any FPS, for that matter - is head and shoulders above the frequently genuine misfire that was the gunplay in Finest Hour.

The game also manages to maintain the decent variety of gameplay types that were set up in Finest Hour; whilst the majority of the game is still boots on the ground, gun in hand, there’s still the obligatory tank missions, sections that put you in a mounted turret tank, jeep and boats alike - and one solid-ass level where you’re a gunner in an American bomber. And it’s not just dropping bombs for ten minutes, you actually move about the innards of the plane, taking various weaponry positions and navigating around the increasingly damaged bomber. Really good stuff, comparable to how different the UAV sequence in Modern Warfare was those handful of years later. If I had to complain about one thing, it's the lack of a defence map, the equivalent of the Warehouse defence sequence in Finest Hour - sure, defending a single point for ten minutes can be seen as a slog by some people, but y’all underestimate just how much I love defensive missions. There’s a handful of sequences like it in Big Red One, but there’s nothing that quite hits the same way. Overall, outside of a lack of tank missions which were a pretty enjoyable mainstay in Finest hour, I think Big Red One’s more alternate forms of gameplay are really, really satisfying - any time you’re thrown on a heavy, mounted machine gun, literally tearing Nazis to shreds, it becomes an almost euphoric sense of excitement and joy.

Overall, It’s in these ideas that I feel Big Red One truly is the inverse of the first game; the entire foundation is such an incredible improvement over anything in Finest Hour. Conversely, everything that I loved about that first game, in spite of the frequently rough gunplay - the multiple campaigns, the dreary, frequently melancholy tone, the general war-torn, depressive atmosphere that a World War 2 game *should* showcase - is utterly gone from Big Red One.

Call of Duty: Big Red One holds the dubious distinction of the kind of game that is, objectively, much more fun to actually play than its janky predecessor and is leaps and bounds better designed and whatnot, but suffers from the virulent issue that it’s just a hell of a lot less interesting than what came before. Rather than capitalizing on the ‘World’ part of World War 2, Big Red One solely focuses on a division of American soldiers as they fight across Africa, Italy, and finally Europe. With each of the three campaigns in Finest Hour, I found there was always an overall goal the campaign was pushing for - liberating Stalingrad for the Russian campaign, sabotaging German bases in the British one, and crossing the River Rhine in the American. By comparison, the efforts of the Big Red One just feel like - not to look down on the armed service - another day at the office. Even the locations don’t feel that distinct from one another; whilst Africa is fairly distinctive, once you hit the Italian section of the campaign, most maps kind of blend into one another. I’m unsure as to the decision for Finest Hour to feature three separate campaigns for each major power, and then Big Red One to focus just on American troops came from their respective developers or Activision oversight, but regardless, I feel it’s a massive loss for a game that doesn’t have an overall narrative beyond ‘shoot them Nazis’ and generally failing to make me care about the various members of the Big Red One division. On both a narrative and gameplay level, I found Big Red One’s campaign almost lethally boring; whereas I gave at least a bit of a shit about the characters I was around in each of Finest Hour’s three campaigns, I couldn’t give two shakes about the characters in the Big Red One division. Even sticking around them for the entirety of the game’s eight hour campaign - sans one bomber mission - I didn’t grow attached to literally any of them, with war’s end leaving me feeling exactly the same as I did when I came in: nothing. But even whilst no one is solely playing Call of Duty for the setting, actually playing the campaign didn’t feel that much better. Playing the campaign was fun enough at the moment, mostly due to the improvements over Finest Hour, but whilst I can remember specific moments and setpieces of Finest Hour, even after only a few weeks since wrapping on Big Red One I can barely think of more than two examples from the second game. Call of Duty lives and dies on these moments, and Big Red One is an abject failure on this front. I’m sure if you were to boot up Big Red One now, you’d have a good enough time with it, but it wouldn't remotely surprise me if none of the experience remains in your mind a month onwards.

Whilst Finest Hour was mainly frustrating in the foundational elements of the game - namely, it’s gunplay and occasional total lack of checkpoints - the big moments I soured on Big Red One’s gameplay was in its encounter design, with a huge proportion of sections that gave me grief being those that lock you in tight, close-quarter environment. This is mostly because if you happen to run into one or more enemies with automatic weaponry, if you don’t instantly take them out they will shred through your health in mere seconds. Time to kill felt very, very low at times in this game, even on Normal and whilst I felt the overall difficulty of Big Red One was less than Finest Hour, I found myself stuck on particular sections far more often, which somehow feels even more annoying. Two missions stick out to me as being particularly annoying - The Great Crusade, which covers the battle of Normandy, and Crucifix Hill, a slog that consists of poorly lit, foggy trenches with seemingly thousands of crevices for Germans to pepper you with lead. So many times a grenade would roll just into that awful spot, or I’d be shot down by a foe I’d barely seen, and then we do it all again. Thankfully, the game is far less stringent in regards to checkpoints than its predecessors, giving you (most of the time) a decent amount of checkpoints throughout each area, though I did find a handful encounters (again, in the levels I previously mentioned) where they string you through a lot of high-difficulty sections with almost no breathing room.

Whilst Finest Hour wasn’t a notably ugly game, it wasn’t quite the showcase of the PS2’s power that it should’ve been. Big Red One is a massive improvement over that. Battles feel bigger than ever, with more allies and foes on screen at once. Specific character models, especially that of the various Big Red One members, are massively improved over it’s predecessor, though I feel the animations of enemies have been toned back a bit. The soundtrack, on the other hand, whilst perfectly serviceable, lacks a bit of that almost cinema-esque gravitas that really made moments like the battle of Stalingrad or the final bridge fight stick out from other titles in the series. It’s just very ‘FPS’ music and that isn’t good or bad, it’s just how it is.

In retrospect, whilst it seems Finest Hour is generally regarded at large as the worst of the PS2-era CoDs, and Big Red One it’s best, I couldn’t disagree more with that belief. Finest Hour’s much more engaging campaigns and overall macabre tone manage to win out, even with its much more frustrating gameplay quibbles. Big Red One isn’t bad - far from it - but its depiction of warfare feels so much less heartfelt and mortifying than much of Finest Hour’s, and the lack of alternate viewpoints a la the Russian and British campaigns feel like massive misses in retrospect. It is a far more fun game to play, but that leads to the far more poorly and brutally designed levels feeling far less easy to dismiss as compared to the overall jankier designed prequel. Overall, whilst Big Red One is perfectly serviceable in its own right, I’d be much quicker to recommend its jankier, but more interesting prequel, or more mechanically sound and well-paced sequel. The PS2 era for Call of Duty was a strange one, but personally, Big Red One is the title that suffers the most. With no legacy to speak of, it suffers a fate worse than awfulness - to be forgotten.