That having been said, the Russian missions arenвЂ™t so clearly inspired, and itвЂ™s in those that the Call of Duty: United Offensive campaign reaches a fever pitch.

ItвЂ™s interesting to note, whether it represents a dearth of imagination or not, Call of Duty always seems at its best the closer it hews to its obvious influences. It does, admittedly, open with a sequence set aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber which is really, despite its great presentation, just an on-rails turret sequence, but it quickly puts boots on the ground for a Guns of Navarone rip-off that tasks the player-character, an SAS Major, and the Dutch Resistance, with demolishing coastal guns in Sicily. The British campaign, which is flanked by its more grandiose American and Russian equivalents, turns down some of the bombast in favour of a more intimate clutch of missions tasking the player with sabotage behind enemy lines. Well, I suppose it does, actually, but only by design. The opening is fraught with such hair-raising madness that it eclipses almost anything in the original campaign right out of the gate, and never slows down from there. ItвЂ™s bigger, itвЂ™s bolder, itвЂ™s more chaotic, and it doesnвЂ™t care how you feel about any of this. ItвЂ™s obvious from the first of these, the Siege of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, that United Offensive isnвЂ™t playing around. Across three campaigns, slightly shorter but more intense than their vanilla equivalents, players pilot three unremarkable Allies вЂ“ an American paratrooper, a British commando, and a Russian infantryman вЂ“ through cinematically-inspired offensives throughout the European theatre.

Call of duty united offensive