Not Bad For The Guys Behind Turning Point >_>
If you're a fan of Call of Duty on PC and see Finest Hour, it is advised you stay entirely clear of this entry into the COD series. And it is such a shame too as the 2003 PC game of the year is perhaps one of the best first person shooters ever made. Call of Duty on PC breathes new life into the increasingly dull WW2 shooter genre; Finest Hour does nothing close to that. Regardless, developers Spark have atleast tried to imitate the fantastic gameplay offered on PC.
Finest Hour offers a varied list of missions with three campaigns: the Russians, Americans and British all playing at different points during the Second World War. Finest Hour also has you switch between a number of characters in each campaign, which enables you to understand a more diverse synopsis of the fighting in each period you play in. Several missions even take you away from the usual ground fighting to piloting a tank which stops the game from growing dry and repetitive occasionally during play.
The atmosphere itself also seems authentic and Finest Hour finally doesn't delay in promoting the fact you're a soldier caught in the mist of the action with nothing but wits, grenades and a couple of guns at your disposal. The only problem is, the guns all don't fire the way you'd expect them to – at all. Powerful weapons like the 45 Calibre Thompson and 7.62 BAR use just as many bullets as a far weaker weapon like the 9mm MP40 in order to dispatch German troops.
This can't do, not at all and it heavily contrasts to the PC version of Call of Duty because of it. Also team AI, another key feature to Call of Duty is ineffective in Finest Hour and your squad mates will often run into your line of fire and sometimes miss important mission objectives entirely – a sign of poor programming by the developers Spark. Call of Duty Finest Hour is a wretchedly designed entry into the COD series. While Finest Hour is no doubt a smooth running shooter, suitably paced at 60FPS throughout most of play, It suffers miserably due to some incredibly poor animation. The characters for example appear undeniably stiff and stoic by Gamecube standards.
But the most incontrovertible error made by Spark comes from the unbelievably weak death animations. The death animations of the soldiers before they eventually hit the ground dead are absolutely cringe-worthy and melodramatic. The deaths are also immensely prolonged which often will confuse as you're never quite sure as to whether the soldiers are genuinely dying or not. Which becomes a problem as Finest Hour suffers from unresponsive controls as well. Movement is disappointingly slow and sluggish so fire-fights are forestalled due to it aswell.
Combine the clumsy controls with an equally inappropriate control layout (with down on the D-pad to reload and B to throw grenades) and ultimately the ambience that Spark so carefully articulated goes down the drain. Two minor gameplay predicaments in form of a lack of inability to skip cut-scenes and the lack of checkpoints during levels only further hamper the blemishes found on Finest Hour otherwise.
Though Call of Duty Finest Hour does have its own ambitious as a COD game. The developers Spark even quite pompously included an extras section featuring all their work including a making of feature to show their "success" with the creation of Finest Hour. These features can be unlocked through completing each campaign if you really have the patience to within the first hour of play. It also features a resoundingly high quality orchestral and melancholy soundtrack which provides a suitable level of suspense to Finest Hour's action.
If you do still intend to play and complete Finest Hour, it is roughly under ten hours – an unsurprisingly prompt length of time given it is a first person shooter being reviewed. Though Finest Hour's tight spacing of checkpoints and medic kits throughout the level make play more difficult than it should be. You also lose all of everything you've obtained earlier in the level when you revert back to the checkpoint and that makes the game more difficult if you want to remain using a particular gun or have been saving up medic kits throughout the level.
Visually, Finest Hour appears to be very static and the textures are far too washed out and lacking in detail. It doesn't make particularly decent use of the Gamecube's hardware or technical capabilities either, infact there is a total lack of multiplayer, not even a splitscreen option. Because of that and all else considered it is best to totally ignore Finest Hour. It is a broken, disgusting imitation of Infinity Ward's PC classic and has little in common with it either besides having the same name and genre, not bad for the blokes behind the mediocre Turning Point and Legendary of recent a time...