Call of Duty 2: Big Red One

Call of Duty 2: Big Red One is another installment in the series' console branch, this time from the hands of Treyarch, which took over the baton from Spark Unlimited and created a game independent of the parallel-developed next-gen Call of Duty 2 by Infinity Ward. The game follows the fate of a company from the American 1st Infantry Division, nicknamed the "Big Red One," from the landing in North Africa through the invasion of Sicily to the landing in Normandy and the final battles in Germany, and compared to Finest Hour it places much greater emphasis on a connected narrative thread, specific squad characters, and their relationships with one another - the entire story is furthermore framed as the memory of an old veteran recounting it to a young private, giving the game a stronger dramatic arc and a more cohesive narrative than Finest Hour, which alternated between three fronts, had.

The PlayStation 2 version was released alongside the Xbox and GameCube versions. It's important not to confuse it with the identically named Call of Duty 2 for PC and Xbox 360 by Infinity Ward, released the same year - it's a completely different game with a different campaign, different characters, and a different engine, adapted to the PS2's lower performance. On PlayStation 2, this showed up as coarser textures, lower resolution, and a somewhat shorter draw distance compared to the more powerful Xbox, but the campaign content, number of missions, and weapon set remained exactly the same as on the other consoles, just with fewer soldiers visible at once in the larger battle scenes.

Big Red One is still regarded today as one of the finest war titles of its console generation thanks to its cinematic storytelling, strong atmosphere, and emphasis on brotherhood in arms, even though commercially it stood in the shadow of the parallel-released PC and Xbox 360 installment by Infinity Ward, which carried the same number in its title but was completely unrelated to this title in gameplay and story - something that often confused players at the time when choosing in stores.

Why play it: For lovers of cinematically told war stories emphasizing brotherhood in arms, this is one of the finest titles of its console generation, even though commercially it stood in the shadow of the identically named but unrelated installment by Infinity Ward.