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The platonic ideal of the isometric shooter, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved is novel, features a distinct visual identity, is perfectly paced, and is endlessly replayable. It single-handedly justified Microsoft's "Xbox Live Arcade" concept and is an evergreen video game experience.
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I have complicated feelings about Infinity Ward. There's no question that they're the most influential FPS developers since Bungie, and I think the core mechanics of the Call of Duty series are fundamentally strong. However, Infinity Ward games rarely coalesce into something I'm interested in as a full package. CoD multiplayer is casual fun, for me. I have no interest in taking it seriously, and haven't bothered to actually buy and play one online since 2009. The campaigns, too, are so transparently propagandistic that spending any amount of money to see what they have going on - let alone spending $60-$70! - is a big ask.
Call of Duty 2 is a different story. While most of the campaign consists of the usual 'video game-ified,' History Channel-ish depiction of infamous WWII conflicts, Call of Duty 2 goes out of its way to demonstrate a less action-movie-ified ideation of war the way the Modern Warfare and Black Ops games do. It doesn't feel as exploitative. It's also more interested in the scale of war, featuring several sequences with many individual soldiers fighting over great distances, alongside the potential for discrete, tense man-to-man shootouts.
Some of the best sequences in the campaign are the ones where the player has to solve an unusual, albeit realistic, problem. There's one sequence in the middle of the campaign in which your batallion is hit by a landmine and your tasked with surviving under the wreckage of a truck. While all FPS games are, to some extent, power fantasies, sequences like that don't exactly convey 'I'm a badass hero,' and I appreciate that.
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