Activision/PS2, Xbox, GC (£29.99-£39.99)

Call of Duty was Activision’s intense PC actioner set amid the suffocating chaos of the Second World War. Earlier this year the first-person PC game scooped a Bafta as the best game on any platform; now the madness finally comes to the consoles in a fresh outing — Finest Hour.

What singles out this series from the rest is that it homes in on the sheer intensity and ugliness of war. This is not one of those games in which you will win the contest single-handedly; instead, you’ll find yourself involved in enormous battles where you will rarely feel like more than a tiny cog in the Allies’ vast war machine. In the opening scenario of the single-player game, for example, as a raw Russian conscript you must help to take Stalingrad back from the Germans.

To do so, you arrive by boat along with hundreds of others.

The epic feel of the game settles down for the missions. Here you serve as part of a small unit that is convincingly brought together to give you loyal and competent team-mates. Across the missions you can play in units from the Russian, British and American forces in a mix of all-out battles and quieter stealth operations carried out on Eastern, Western and North African fronts.

Only a few locations from the original PC game make it into the console version, and while the graphics cannot quite reproduce the lustre and magic of the PC title, they get very close. The visuals are rich and robust, particularly on the Xbox, and the sound effects are superb.

The PS2 and Xbox versions boast online multiplayer games with voice support, for team-based action pitting Axis versus Allies in the game’s key battles. For fans of the original Call of Duty PC game, an expansion pack, United Offensive, is also due out shortly.

TIM WAPSHOTT

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