Publication Date: 29/05/2025

Call of Duty: Finest Hour

I really adore going back and experiencing the evolution of a particular series of game, and for some reason that goes double for shooters. It’s so easy to take for granted all the creature comforts and technical advancements in modern shooters of our day - regenerating health, forgiving checkpoints, pitch-perfect controls and a truly cinematic shine, but it wasn’t always like that. Console shooters as we know it are a much younger genre then I’d otherwise expect - GoldenEye set the stage for it’s potential, but a dual-analog stick shooter the way we think of shooters today didn’t really exist ‘till the turn of the century. For whatever reason, I decided to play around with the original *console* Call of Duty - separate to the original Call of Duty, which was released a year prior just for PC. Call of Duty: Finest Hour is one of the most definitive depictions of seeing how much a series can grow over years and decades; modern Call of Duty games are some of the smoothest, most well-controlling games put out in all of gaming. Finest Hour is none of that. It is a frequently frustrating, brutally difficult game, with an asinine lack of care put into its checkpoint or AI ally design systems. But beyond these incredible frustrations, I genuinely found one of the best campaigns in the entire franchise, and one of the finest - and most brutal - depictions of war Activision’s premier series have ever put to disc, and whilst I would overall describe the game as ‘just’ fine, it has an innate appeal and attraction to it that I just haven’t been able to shake.

Sidenote, I’m only really going to be talking about the game’s single player offerings, as the triple whammy of playing this on emulator, the lack of connectivity the PS2 has, and the fact I don’t think I know a single person who wants to play the original Call of Duty with me makes it kind of moot.

Finest Hours’ singleplayer consists of three bespoke and unconnected campaigns, each representing a different front of the Second World War; the first places you in the Russian Campaign, defending Stalingrad during it’s chaotic siege and hitting back against the German aggressors; the British Campaign, which takes place in North Africa and tasks you with taking out German outposts and supply lines; and finally, the American Campaign, as the Army begins the push on Germany’s western front and attempts to cross the River Rhine. Regardless of level quality - which can vary *heavily* - I rather enjoyed the entire campaign throughout, though it very much has somewhat of a decline in quality across its suite. Which is less to say the later levels are bad, but more it starts off so damn strong.

The Russian Campaign, particularly its Stalingrad levels, are the cream of the crop of Finest Hour’s single player offerings, and genuinely belong in discussion as amongst the best campaigns in the franchise. Conversely, whilst not innately bad, the British and American campaigns feel a lot more run of the mill, a lot of ‘kicking ass and taking names’ kind of experience, but the Russian has the sense of desperation a war game *should* have, something that I’ve only really felt replicated in the fantastic Call of Duty: World at War. It also was the campaign in which the difficulty of the game felt the most ‘diegetic’, if that makes sense; the sheer brutality and cataclysmic suffering that took place during the Siege of Stalingrad (not to downplay the tragedy by comparing it to a video game) feels recreated in how easy it is to be slaughtered in these stages. An early stage tasks you with maneuvering your way up a dug-in hill within Stalingrad, carving your way through trenches and clearing out bunkers. A single mistake will leave you exposed, and very quickly filled with a variety of different caliber of lead - sure, due to the wonky controls of the gunplay, this was occasionally quite frustrating, but at least in these earlier levels, the brutality felt like a conscious decision, not just the downsides of the archaic gameplay.

Finest Hour is at its best when it diverts somewhat from the kind of gameplay everyone knows and expects from Call of Duty, and the Russian campaign gives you the greatest variety of mission types to play with. For example, an early mission will put you behind the controls of a tank, and you truly feel like an absolute monstrous force on the battlefield, with next to nothing beyond a squad of enemy tanks even slowing you down, with infantry turning to dust from a single round. A later mission plants you in a factory, defending it for a full ten minutes from legions of German troops, many sporting rocket launchers and machine guns in an attempt to breach the doors of the factory, creating a genuinely pulse-pounding, adrenaline-spiking encounter that really feels like the kind of last stand I adore. I just really, really like defensive combat in games like this, with this example almost having a taste of the experience of CoD: Zombies that would become so popular in just a few years time.

Sadly, the other campaigns don’t quite hit the mark of the genuinely quite stellar Russian Campaign; whilst the British Campaign has a very unique visual flair and vibe due to it’s more covert narrative and it’s North African setting, and the American Campaign has some really excellent, city-based set pieces, these segments of the game highlight the more innate issues the console debut Call of Duty faced all those years ago. They still have their moments - I especially enjoy the narrative premise of the tank missions in the American campaign, featuring an all-black squad of soldiers trying to carve out their own piece of history in the war. Plus, the concepts of city fighting - taking block after block, slowly carving through resistance is genuinely pulse pounding at times, especially due to how real the danger of instant death can be. Call of Duty: Finest Hour is, inherently, a foundationally good game. In theory; most missions are exciting and are fun to play in a vacuum, especially the ones that mixed up the formula, particularly the Russian missions or any of the entertaining tank battles. As compared to future Call of Duty games - particularly after the universally acclaimed Modern Warfare - Finest Hour doesn’t have a dedicated narrative beyond ‘shoot them Nazis’, and so the decision to focus on smaller, more contained campaigns highlighting each major Allied power was a much better decision. Along with the fantastic score that pulled me into the bleak, chaotic ‘world’ of the campaigns, there’s a lot to love, but there are just so many basic issues Call of Duty’s initial console outing just gets… well, wrong.

There’s no other word for the gunplay in Finest Hour then ‘clunky’. Even beyond the baffling (for me, in 2025 at least) decision to have you zoom with L1 and fire with R2, firing on enemies in this game feels… weird. Even with your sights trained on them, gunfire feels loose and imprecise, with it almost - almost - feeling like random chance you actually manage to land shots on your opposing enemy. Most automatic weaponry feel so inaccurate that my only real option - on Hard difficulty at least - was to use more precision, manual weaponry, usually attempting to take headshots wherever I could. Of course, nothing satisfies or accomplishes more then a solid-ass rocket launcher, which will stop anything - man or machine, but I essentially implore you, if you wish to have a good time, to be gunslinging with a Garand or a sniper rifle, at any chance - relying on automatic weaponry, or firing from the hip will quickly send you to the ground. I’m not sure if it’s connected to the odd sense of gunfire, but it also really felt like enemies took a very inconsistent amount of shots to drop them. Sometimes a headshot would take them out in a single blow, but other times it felt like two or three. I had encounters where I felt like I pumped an entire clip into an enemy's chest, but they simply staggered for a second and came back with a second wind. The enemy, of course, don’t have this issue - they’ll hit you with an almost frighteningly level of accuracy, and most sections that place you in more horizontal, linear battlefields you’ll spend most of your time popping in and out of rubble and from behind walls due to the bonafide blizzard of gunfire coming your way. Plus, you always have to take into account the cardinal sin of being unaware of enemies spawning in *behind* you to light you up. Delightful. Like I said, it can feel kind of diegetic, the danger of death coming at any moment, but with how brutal the other elements of the gameplay can be, it doesn’t make it particularly fun at times.

Never before have I found AI teammates in a shooter as frustratingly unhelpful and annoying as in Finest Hour. Inaccurate at best, beyond units who exist as part of the game’s story, they seemed to exist to just stand in my way and get shot down. Finest Hour’s shooting works in a way that not only can you not perform friendly fire on your allies, but you can’t even fire if they’re generally in front of you, leading to a variety of situations where I was gunned down because SOMEONE decided to poke out of cover just to the right of my reticle, preventing me from killing my target and allowing said target to do the very same to me. I spent the better part of an hour getting through a mission in the American Campaign which featured some brutal, alley-way based encounters. I was essentially fighting alone, as my teammates seemingly found the idea of actually landing a hit laughable. It was brutal, but I made it. Eventually I got through the twenty-odd enemies and multi-machine guns, and was about to genuinely finish the level when one of my squad mates just randomly tossed a grenade near me, killing me instantly.

I stopped playing for three days.

Even when they’re not blowing you to smithereens, they find all other ways to be annoying. Not only do they seem to frequently fail at actually assisting you in fighting the hordes of Germans beating down your position, they can literally push you out of the scant amount of cover you can find in some of these set pieces. No joke, it seems that the AI teammates have some sort of weird model priority, as they can slide you out of cover, directly into enemy fire, but you can’t really do more than nudge them a little here or there in response. There were at least a dozen notable deaths where I’d been either knocked out of cover, or couldn’t get to cover because of my asshole teammates. Just lovely.

The issues with janky AI, clunky shooting and generally brutal difficulty could be somewhat forgiven if Finest Hour wasn’t an example of some of the stingiest checkpointing I’ve ever seen in a shooter, *ever*. Seriously, considering you’re unable to quit a level and return at your last checkpoint, lock in if you want to get through this game’s more brutal levels. Most levels have at least one or two checkpoints to reward you for pushing through some horrendously challenging (or, occasionally, designed) sequences, but conversely, some just offer you no checkpoints at all, regardless of the length of the mission. Hilariously, some of the hardest missions in the game - Depot Sabetours, the second level of the British Campaign, First City to Fall, the first level of the American Campaign, and Into The Heartland, the game’s final level all rank as the hardest content the game has to offer, a large element of which is due to the fact that they don’t feature a single checkpoint despite how brutal they can be. In particular, Into the Heartland is a genuinely thrilling, pulse pounding experience as you slowly make your way down a gigantic bridge, facing hordes of dug in enemies and gun emplacements. It’s a twenty minute experience that would honestly rank amongst some of my favourite setpieces in the series if the level had a *single* checkpoint. Your skills are pushed to the very edge, in probably some of the most difficult sections the game has on offer, and if you make a single, notable mistake? Start over. I died - twice - on the last encounter of the game, and it made me almost quit at the genuine finish line. The game being stingy with checkpoints is one thing - it’s brutal, but I can overcome that kind of brutality, but going through an entire level without them? Insanity.

Call of Duty: Finest Hour is kind of a crazy game of extremes; I genuinely think it’s campaign, especially its Russian Campaign, is really strong and conveys the horrors of war amongst the best in the franchise, and the decent chunk of variety in it’s gameplay - with much of my praise going to the Defend the Factory encounter - really helps it from growing stale. If the rest of the game was as strong as the Russian Campaign, I could make the argument for it having one of the strongest campaigns in the series, even with the janky gameplay and brutal difficulty - but they aren’t, and thus, it is an issue. Clunky as hell and so brutal it almost pushed me away from playing, Call of Duty: Finest Hour is very much a product of its times, the first attempt at a console Call of Duty, and whilst it’s janky and brutal and occasionally very, very unfun - but I kinda love it, even if I don’t think I’ll play it again. I love seeing the evolution of series though thick and thin, and I think I’ll continue along the Call of Duty timeline - especially since it’s follow-up, Big Red One, was one of those games I never quite finished as a child. But I digress - is Call of Duty: Finest Hour worth playing? I’d say it’s worth diving through the Russian Campaign, a genuinely thrilling series of levels. Beyond that? Stick with it as long as you’d like - just don’t be an idiot like me, and don’t play on Hard.