Your squad mates in Fox Company are the standard clichéd variations, the loudmouthed guy from New Jersey, the laconic westerner etc. While they add enormously to the storyline and the cut scenes, your fellow soldiers can be irritatingly dense. They have an annoying tendency to step in front of you in narrow trenches, foxholes and bunkers, generally resulting in you, busily lining up a shot at a particularly troublesome German position, shooting your squad mate in the back. As an added bonus, they are, at times, extremely poor shots, standing a few feet from a German position and unable to hit the German gunners.

The last warning I will give you about your squad is you cannot rely on them to clear a room. They will often move into a another room after you have finished what you believed to be the last defender, and run right past some German standing in plain sight, leaving you as easy meat.

Graphically Big Red One is first rate, with some terrific-looking environments and good character animations. I felt a genuine wince of sympathy the first time I saw a soldier tossed like a rag doll from an explosion. While the game is violent, it does not contain graphic violence (i.e. limbs flying, etc.).

The biggest single problem with Big Red One I experienced was the lack of save points in the game. You could save at the end of a mission and at some specified checkpoints, however, it was an absolute pain to have to restart the mission after you had made considerable progress. For difficult missions, the repetition was tedious, reinforces the linear, limited feel of the game levels. For an occasional gamer such as myself, there is nothing worse then a game that does not let you progress.

Overall to an un-jaded newbie to the WWII shooter realm, I found Call of Duty 2: Big Red One to be first-rate.

For a look at the history and actions of the real Big Red One, drop by their website.

Call of Duty 2: Big Red One is a rated T (Teen) by the ESRB for Blood, Mild Language, Violence. This game can also be found on: PS2, Xbox.