Call of Duty Review

Infinity Ward was founded by people who had just finished a landmark Normandy shooter, and their first game reads as an argument with it. The lone hero is gone. You advance behind a squad that calls positions, throws smoke, dies without asking permission, and generally makes every corridor feel occupied by more than one person. The three campaigns hand you an American paratrooper, a British commando and a Soviet conscript, and the Stalingrad opening still lands: a rifle for every second man, a commissar behind you, and a river crossing that gives you no weapon at all.

Technically it is a Quake III engine pushed further than it had any right to go, with scripted moments that were genuinely startling in 2003 and a Red Square finale that closes the three viewpoints properly. Multiplayer was competent rather than era-defining, and the scripting can feel like a rail if you stop to poke at it. What it invented is the modern military shooter's grammar of noise, momentum and companionship, and almost everything the series later became is already sketched here.