I’ve got a review for Call of Duty: United Offensive up over at ESCMag. Go and read it and understand what true critical thinking is when it comes to video games. Oh yes.

Actually, the one thing I didn’t note in that review is how well the game — the UO expansion and the original — builds up a completely different atmosphere between the three Allied powers that you end up playing. When you’re the Americans, for example, everything looks offical and plentiful and you’re always surrounded by squads of your own buddies.

But as soon as you move to the British, even though you might be in a group with some other dudes, you’re always in a scenario where you’re five minutes from being completely wiped out. Everything looks a little more refined and polished than it does when you’re fighting as the US, and the snippets of in-game dialogue are typically ironic, zippy and English.

It’s most obvious, though, by the time you’re playing as a Soviet soldier in the Red Army. Your mission briefings are little more than desperate scribbling in a soldier’s diary, and then bam, you’re out on your own, and if you don’t find some guy who has hit shit together, you’re going to get completely cut apart.

It’s interesting that the game developers did that, and you wonder if it was a deliberate decision, or if it’s just what naturally flowed from the research that they did into the WWII squad-level fighting experience. Either way, it’s quite a journey down from relatively well-fed American, to desperate behind-the-lines Brit, to a Russian soldier charging a machine gun nest on the banks of the Volga without so much as a rifle.

And honestly, as much fun as it is to do crazy shit in that game, the number of times that I get cut down remind me that in a real war, I wouldn’t be the invincible John Wayne, Tom Hanks or Ron Livingston — I’d be the guy right next to him, who gets his head caved in by a machine gun while he’s calling in for artillery support.

A lot of your left-leaning, tree-hugging, whale-loving types will probably tell you that these games turn you into a remorseless killing machine, but to that point, let me simply say:

  1. Any game that shows you 1,000 different ways you can be killed can hardly convince you of your own immortality, and
  2. viewing even a modest simulation of a real, huge, scary battlefield can only increase one’s appreciation for the courage of people who actually go to war.

And, incidentally, my gratitude that this is probably the closest I will ever come to a war myself.

Hopefully.