In the years that have passed, the life of a soldier at War has been glorified by its fair share of films, books and games. In reality, the life of the average soldier during World War Two was far from glorious. Everywhere you looked was met by the most awful sights imaginable, ten minutes would pass like ten hours and every moment breathing was spent wishing you were someplace else...Well as far as authenticity goes, Call of Duty: Finest Hour (COD from now on) recreates that experience completely.

The single-player campaign is split into three smaller campaigns each told from a different perspective. The first campaign sees you playing as various Russian soldiers during the German invasion of Stalingrad. The British campaign follows and has you fighting as the famous Desert Rats in Africa before concluding with the Battle of the Bulge playing as the Americans. The different characters and campaigns can feel a little disjointed from a narrative point of view but allow for many varied set pieces and situations.

The problem is that unfortunately, nothing about COD is alot of fun. Right from the opening mission's on-rails introduction, the first thing you will notice is how incredibly out dated it looks. I understand that COD is a cross-platform release, but I could have sworn I was playing a first-generation PS2 game, not a new Xbox title. Simplistic ugly character and vehicle models, ugly low-resolution textures, awkward repetitive animations and poor special effects litter the unimaginative environments. Don't expect to see rag-doll physics in COD because you will instead see the same death animations over and over again, you may even witness some synchronised dying.

The graphics in COD are simply awful and the complete lack of not only blood (why a game with no blood or swearing got a MA15+ rating is beyond me), but even shadows really brings the overall graphical standard crashing down like a boxy physics defying Stuka dive bomber. Add to that the overall brightness (or lack thereof) which is especially noticeable in the first few missions as it is quite common to get lost in the dark environments or struggle to see the enemy shooting at you. To rub salt into the wound, there is no way to change the gamma settings in-game and you are expected to adjust your TV settings to match the game. There is simply no excuse for the game to look as bad as it does on a system as powerful as the Xbox, nor is it excusable to not allow for user-adjusted brightness options within the game.

The bad news doesn't stop with the graphics unfortunately. The allied and enemy AI is far from intelligent. Soldiers from either side will frequently get stuck on various bits of blocky level geometry, running in the one spot or even spinning in circles! Friendly soldiers wander into your sights (thankfully you can disable fratricide) and frequently shoot at the enemy from point blank range with little success. At one point in the game you are require to stave off German Panzershrecks (German Bazookas) with a sniper rifle from the top floor of an under siege warehouse.

To do this you have to move from window to window in order to achieve the best angle to cover both the left and right approaches. Having found a window that provided clear lanes of fire to both sides, I set about sniping Nazis to my Russian heart's content only to be rudely interrupted by an AI controlled ally soldier. A fellow comrade following a clearly unmodifiable AI script decided (was programmed to) take up a position at my window. This resulted in him physically pushing my character out of the way and then proceeding to block my aim -- Exit to main menu, options, enable friendly fire, return to game and fire! -- Problem solved.

The difficulty level of COD isn't especially high, but can be very frustrating due to poor design decisions. Most of the points where you will become stuck revolve around you protecting someone or something from being killed or destroyed. Without having any control over the suicidal actions of those you are protecting and not being able to rely of any allies to provide constructive assistance, can result in these protective tasks becoming quite a chore.

Saving your progress in COD is performed automatically but unlike the well-placed checkpoints in Halo, COD checkpoints are not only very few and far between but also in bizarre locations. You will quickly tire of repeatedly running through pointless areas after restarting from a checkpoint, in order to reach where the action actually begins and with your weapons reset to the mission default!

The surround sound effects created through the Dolby Digital mix are quite good, in particular the wiz and crack of bullets flying past your head are very effective. A concussion effect is simulated if you get too close to explosions; however some of the sounds from the weapons you carry lack true conviction. The sound effects are by no means bad, but they aren't as good as other games in the genre such as Medal of Honour: Rising Sun. The musical score used in COD is what you would expect for a game of its type with orchestral Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers style tunes, which complement the game's atmosphere well during lulls in the noise of battle.

Controls in COD are a mixed bag. You are given quite a few different pre-set control configurations to choose from of which only a few are really useable. It beats me why every game doesn't have the option to map functions to controller inputs in console games. First Person Shooters (FPS) on PC have had the ability to map functions to keyboard keys from the very early days of Wolfenstein 3D. Why then is it so impossible to do the same for the Xbox controller?

One curious control quirk was experience when controlling a tank. You could view and operate both the tanks weapons and movement (I wonder what the rest of the crew were doing?) from either an internal first-person view, a third person view, or a first person view from atop the tanks turret. The first-person view was easy enough although a little hard to see where you were going, but when viewed from third-person the aiming crosshair seemed way off target. From some distances I couldn't hit anything with rounds missing where I was supposably aiming by large margins.

Finest Hour's one saving grace would have to be the inclusion of Xbox Live play, and even this is a mixed blessing. On the plus side it allows you to escape the mindless idiocy of A.I. controlled players and play against some (hopefully!) challenging human players. On the downside however, the lack of visual flair and overall sluggish gameplay fails to excite, especially with the likes of Halo 2 providing much better gameplay on Live. Still, if you'd rather play Axis vs Allies than humans vs aliens, you may get a bit of a kick out of Call of Duty: Finest Hour