The
Forgotten Hope Mod for BF1942 is brilliant. Adds realism, tonnes of maps, vehicles, weapons, and nationalities (Germans, British, Americans, Soviets, Japanese, French, Polish, Australians, Canadians, Finnish, and Italians all come fully equipped with their own historically accurate weapons, uniforms, and vehicles). Also, not everyone gets a parachute, or if they do, they only get a sidearm and a knife, so you might actually manage to get someone shot-down and not have them running around taking flags in the rear by themselves.
One that hasn't gotten mentioned is
Hidden & Dangerous 2. So, I liked it a bit more than the original COD (I really enjoyed what the expansion-pack did for COD though).
[mildly fanboy-ish post ahoy!]
It's a game that probably won't appeal to the masses as much as Call of Duty, but I'd say that I prefer it due to its details. You play in and lead a 4 man SAS squad in different theatres of the second world war (Norway, Africa, Burma, France, Czechoslovakia), you pick and equip the team (Right on down to their camo-pattern and helmets or compulsory red berets) as you see fit to fight the Wehrmacht, SS, Italians, Japanese, and even the Red Army.
Some neat features:
- Weapons aren't "hitscan". Muzzle velocity and calibre counts. Bullets will also ricochet off of hard oblique surfaces. (Fire down along a corridor in a bunker and your shots hitting the wall will bounce off, lose some velocity, and continue down the hall.) Like Mark Bowden puts it in Black Hawk Down, stay clear of the walls. Bullets travel along them among urban environments.
- Bullets penetrate surfaces such as doors, or can even rip through wooden shacks or thin walls with some of the heavier weapons. If you hear someone behind a door, plug a few rounds through it. You can drop two opponents with a bullet too as it will enter and exit through both if they're standing close enough.
- More freeform gameplay than the tightly scripted WWII shooters like COD and MOH. You're usually given an objective and you're free to approach it from different angles or methods. Be stealthy, go on a head-on assault. Usually a middleground works best. (Sneak, infiltrate, kill a few sentries and guard-dogs, clear the emplaced weapons, find a superior firing position with a clear view, get your Bren or BAR man set up with your sniper, pick off the officers and snipers, get in close with your submachinegunners and carbineers.)
- No "Attack of the Clones". Enemies won't constantly respawn in waves at you. Usually they're all there at the start of the mission. All the corpses and their equipment stay. Aaaand, they all seem to have their own unique faces (fine, they don't, but there are dozens faces for each nationality or combat unit), and outfits (you can see their ammo on their pouches, side-arms, different types of helmets/caps, different uniforms (Kriegsmarine? Luftwaffe AA-Troops? SS? Wehrmacht? Italian? Japanese?) even differing in each theatre. Unlike COD, you aren't fighting the same 4 German enemy-models throughout every mission, depending if its in the snow or not.
- Enemies who'll surrender when overwhelmed, allowing you to capture them and use their uniforms. Don't bother trying to make the SS or Japanese surrender though. They fight to the death. The Italians however aren't all too eager to fight. If you kill them, then you can't use their uniforms (Splattered with blood, full of holes.) Oddly though, if you only wound them in order to get them to surrender, you can still get their uniform clean on yourself even if they have a gunshot-wound decal on their shoulder or something.
- The now compulsory iron sights, (the previous game was apparently the first one to use them) and ragdolls.
- Cheap. I've seen it in the bargain bins. Still, I'm not dissapointed for paying full retail price two years ago. Very nicely packaged fold-out case (like the Max Payne 2 one).
- Oh, and with the expansion pack it has
co-op
It came out about the same time as COD, but didn't do as well. It doesn't appeal to the "lowest common denominator" in the same way, I guess. It isn't the same type of big, epic, and loud non-stop action-movie. It's all about the approach, the planning and improvisation on the spot, and the sudden brutal, gritty and deadly combat.
The bad parts? Sometimes your squadmates' AI is a bit fiddly, even after the patches. The graphics are very competent and solid artistically/level-design-wise but there really aren't any nifty technical shaders. Just nicely lit (vertex-shaded) well animated (no more COD-esque duck waddling crouched squatting movement) relatively high-poly count models and terrain with slightly muddily mid-res textures, but hey, it came out in November 2003. Look at some screenshots and you'll see what I mean, or if you've played Mafia, it uses the same graphics engine.
Bottom line: Hitman (with squad) + Rainbow 6 (with huge outdoor environments too) + (reduced-scale) Operation:Flashpoint + WW2 = H&D2
If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
