In the single player campaign, you will take the role of six different characters who each play their own unique contribution to the war. You start out as a young Russian soldier as you raid Stalingrad trying to reclaim it from the Germans. This was the first of nineteen different missions that span across three distinct locations: Russia, North Africa, and Germany. The missions are a mixture of “on foot” and about a third of the missions in a vehicle that either you control or is on rails where you control a gun. This is a nice way to mix things up from being repetitive, but I found the on foot missions to be more entertaining than the vehicle based ones. Although the scope sounds good on paper, it's unfortunately not as long as a game as you would hope. For a seasoned player who is comfortable with this genre being played on a control pad, it's feasible that you can beat the game in seven to eight hours. Each mission is never very long, but there are a few good ones that will be quite memorable.

Fortunately with Call of Duty being short in its single player campaign mode, there is the multiplayer feature to fall back on. Multiplayer comes in the form of online only which means unfortunately for your GameCube owners out there, you'll miss out. There are four different online modes to select from which include Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and Search and Destroy. What's disappointing though is the generic offering of online play. Despite the slogan that nobody fights alone, there aren't many team based modes let alone modes that require you to work as a team. In fact while the game supports the headset on both platforms, communication is limited to proximity based location which restricts team collaboration. On the upside, the network code is really smooth as the experience was lag free and there are a few good maps to play on that make the online mode pretty entertaining despite it being sort of generic.

Even though the game may fall short in a few areas, it's hard to complain about the graphics or sound in the game. Spark has done wonders with the game by creating the illusion of chaos going on during war. You'll see this right away in the first level as you will see literally hundreds of soldiers on screen at once charging the German forces. Even with all this going on, the framerate remains smooth with the Xbox version maintaining 60 fps most of the time. The GameCube version fluctuates between 60 and 30 and the PS2 remains at a constant and smooth 30 fps. Despite the PS2 version being limited to 30 fps, you never get a sense that framerate isn't smooth. The graphics are impressive enough to the point that the first time I saw the game, I thought I might be looking at a PC title. Spark has also gone through great lengths to research and model all the locations and weapons to be as historically accurate as possible. The level which takes place in Aachen is a great example of their effort.

When it comes to audio, the same level of quality as the graphics has been held here as well. Call of Duty's usage of surround sound can be greatly appreciated with the atmosphere that has been created in the battlefield. Bombs and gunfire will explode all around you and you will get a sense of where it is coming from which can be useful during a gunfight. The developers were careful here to try and be accurate as possible as they went through great lengths to record samples from the actual weapons for authenticity.

For those who have played the original PC version, I'm sorry to say that the console version just doesn't meet up to it in the end. The mission designs and scripted events end up being better executed in the original in comparison to the console version. Even though it doesn’t live up to the PC version, which already was a high standard, it did turn out better than a certain World War II game that came out last year. Despite Spark's numerous man hours spent on detail and accuracy, one can't help that they may have focused too much on it when they could have devoted more effort and time to improve the level design and iron out some of the minor bugs that are scattered throughout the game. Call of Duty: Finest Hour is by no means a bad game, but with intense competition on just about all the other platforms from the flood of first person shooters this holiday season, it doesn't stand out from the others either. It’s this is a solid game that unfortunately doesn't quite live up its PC counterpart.

Score Breakdown:
PS2 - B
Xbox - B
GC - B-