Some days ago I was watching T.V. and I saw this commercial about war. The commercial was in First Person mode and it looked so real. This T.V. commercial was about Call of Duty: Finest Hour. If you have seen this commercial then you know by now how it feels to play this game.

While you play it you definitely feel like you are in a real war. You hear screams and shooting in the background, you see your teammates running for cover and shooting. This game is definitely as awesome as the PC version. While you walk around you can hear your steps, if you walk in snow it won’t sound the same as if you are walking on rocks. It is really realistic, yet not completely realistic.

Why not completely realistic, you ask? Well, let’s just start with the “strategy” in the game. There is absolutely no strategy in the game, there could be if you decide to but nothing as realistic as actual military strategy employed during combat. You just go around running as fast as you can, shooting anything that gets in your way, take cover and reload; then you start running again. With that said, when you melee-hit people, it hits them, but there is no feeling that you actually hit them. You don’t hear any sound of “contact” nor do you feel anything. This lowers the immersion of the game a little bit, but does not lower the fun at all.

There are three different story modes: Eastern Front, North Africa, and Western Front. Each of them has a diverse variety of goals, gameplay and scenarios. In each you get to play the role of different characters, giving even more variety of gameplay. The character you use will determine what guns you will be using. Every mission you play is based on an actual event of World War II so the historical aspect lends even more credibility to the realism.

While I played this game, I sometimes felt nervous: was I going to make it out alive? Or were my teammates going to be there with me all the time to help me out? This is how you are supposed to feel in this kind of game. You are supposed to feel like you are the character in the game; you are supposed to feel how the character felt when he was in this position.

Some aspects of the game might be tricky for those new to the series. For example, tossing grenades has a special trick to toss them where you want, but you will get use to it pretty quickly. Fans from the series will notice a lot of similarity to the gameplay of the PC version, but not the storyline as Finest Hour has its own original story.

The game is intense and crazy. There will be times when you know they are shooting you from somewhere, but you don’t know exactly from where. You run for cover, but don’t know where to hide because you simply don’t know where the shots are coming from. So you just lie prone and start moving -- trying to concentrate and see where the shots are coming from.

There is a great variation of weapons, just like in the PC version. They are all realistic weapons from World War II and it is great to see how much the weapons have changed in only 60 years. Even though weapons were pretty advanced by then, they are nothing compared to today’s advanced technological weapons.

The game graphics are pretty good, and while they are not outstanding, they are competitive. Although the cut scenes look pretty much like the in-game graphics, they look a little bit more sharpened up and a little bit more “realistic”. The voice-overs are quite good and they match the character and the voice motion well.

The controls are pretty easy to get used to if you are a console gamer. If you come directly from the PC to come play this game you might get a little bit of trouble getting used to them, but it won’t take long until you start dominating like you did on the computer. The HUD (Heads Up Display) is pretty useful as you have a compass that lets you know where the goal is at. You also have your “health” so you have an idea of when, or if, you are going to die. And, of course, you have the weapon information to know which weapon you have and how much ammunition is left.

These types of games not only help us remember such historic moments, but they help us see them and re-live them a little. I am pretty sure there is nothing like actually being there, but this game seems to gets very close to what it must’ve been like. Through these games we see that the men and women gave everything they had, even their lives in many cases, just to fight for what they believed in. It was a war that changed the world; a war that will forever live in our hearts from generation to generations.

This game is awesome and a lot of fun to play. It has definitely reached the bar that the PC version set and creates a different and enjoyable World War II game. This is a must have game for the First Person Shooters fans, for the war games fans, and for those that are just looking for some fast paced fun. You won’t regret it.