Call of Duty: Finest Hour

Call of Duty: Finest Hour was the first entry in the series made exclusively for consoles - while the original Call of Duty from 2003 was released only on PC, Activision entrusted the console offshoot to the American studio Spark Unlimited, which built an entirely 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 successively takes on the role 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 entries in the series, the game alternates between three different fronts, three distinct combat styles, and three different sets of weapons within a single campaign, which in 2004 was a fairly unusual approach for consoles, one that no other war shooter offered at the time.

The Xbox version was released alongside the PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions, and thanks to the more powerful console it offered the sharpest picture, the smoothest performance, the longest draw distance, and the most detailed environment textures and character models of all three versions. Content-wise, however, it didn't differ from the PS2 or GameCube versions at all - the campaign, missions, weapons, and difficulty were identical across all platforms; the difference was purely technical and showed up mainly in more detailed textures, more stable frame rates, somewhat better battlefield lighting, and denser smoke and fire in action scenes, which the Xbox of the time handled better than the competing consoles.

At the time, it was a commercially successful and critically well-received title, praised especially for its cinematic direction and the variety of the three fronts, though compared unfavorably in terms of less balanced ally AI behavior than the PC entries of the series at the time. Finest Hour showed that a console Call of Duty had its own reason to exist independent of the series' PC versions, and paved the way for another console entry to be made a year later, Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, this time from the workshop of Treyarch studio, which stayed with the console branch of the series for several more years.

Why play: For its cinematic direction and the variety of its three fronts, Finest Hour earned commercial success and a decent critical reception at the time, albeit with less balanced ally AI than the PC entries.