Call of Duty: Finest Hour

Call of Duty: Finest Hour was the first installment of the series made exclusively for consoles - while the original Call of Duty from 2003 was released only on PC, Activision entrusted the console spin-off to the American studio Spark Unlimited, which built a completely standalone game with its own campaign, its own missions, and its own engine adapted to the controllers and performance of the consoles of the time. The player gradually steps into the roles of a Soviet sniper defending Stalingrad house by house, a British tank crewman fighting in the North African desert, and an American paratrooper who jumps into Normandy and goes through the subsequent fighting in France - so unlike later installments of the series, the game alternates between three different fronts, three distinct combat styles, and three different sets of weapons within a single campaign, which was a fairly unusual approach on consoles in 2004, one no other war shooter offered at the time.

The PlayStation 2 version was released the same day as the Xbox and GameCube versions, and it's not a derivative port of a later PC game or a simplified conversion - it was an equal, simultaneously developed console project that Spark Unlimited built for three platforms at once from the start. Compared to the more powerful Xbox, the game ran on PS2 with slightly coarser textures, shorter draw distance, less detailed background soldier models, and somewhat lower resolution, due to the console's weaker hardware. In terms of content, campaign length, number of missions, and weapon selection, however, the PS2 version was completely identical to its sister releases, so a PlayStation 2 owner didn't miss out on a single mission or weapon - just looked at a somewhat less sharp picture.

At the time, it was a commercially successful and critically decently received title, praised especially for its cinematic direction and the variety of its three fronts, though compared unfavorably regarding the less balanced behavior of allied AI than in the PC installments of the series at the time. Finest Hour showed that the console Call of Duty had its own reason to exist independent of the series' PC versions, and it paved the way for another console installment a year later, Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, this time from the studio Treyarch, which remained in charge of the series' console branch for several more years.

Why play it: For fans of war action games who appreciate cinematic direction and the variety of three fronts, this is a commercially successful and critically decently received title, albeit with less balanced allied AI than on PC.