Review

The situation was well publicized: the core of the team at 2015 who made MoHAA decided to sever the EA leash and start over as Infinity Ward, ready to forge their own destiny, unencumbered by the yoke of their previous taskmaster.  Well, it appears that being 'unencumbered' meant simply making a slightly better version of MoHAA.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  If MoHAA was a terrific cinematic WWII shooter, then a slightly better version of it would be terrific..er.  Right?  Yes.  In what will come as a surprise to precisely no one, the 2015 refugees at Infinity Ward exploited all their hard-earned expertise in designing and implementing the archetypal cinematic WWII shooter to design and implement... an archetypal cinematic WWII shooter.  The games industry is, if nothing else, at least half-socialistic: from each according to his ability.

So Call of Duty is a better MoHAA.  That's the short version of the review.  If you didn't like MoHAA (or shooters-on-rails in general, scripted as tight as a drum) then you can quit reading now - you won't like Call of Duty either.  Similarly, if you liked MoHAA, you can quit reading now - you'll like CoD even more.  For the academics in the audience, the remainder of the review will consist mostly of identifying specific differences between the two, for better or worse.

Good

• Group dynamics.  Despite their best efforts (and occasionally no effort whatsoever), MoHAA couldn't quite avoid the 'lone maverick' syndrome that is endemic to the shooter genre as a whole.  WWII wasn't about lone mavericks.  Like most (organized) conflicts, it was primarily about groups within groups acting in the best interest of the group(s).  In game terms, that translates into friendly AI, and CoD does a much better job of providing you with both the motive and the opportunity to act like part of a team of soldiers, rather than the only individual who can shoot straight.  In fact, the vast majority of the game absolutely hinges on its ability to rely upon squadmate AI to carry the scene, both aesthetically and functionally.  As a player, you'll feel swept up in the riptide of combat, trying to reconcile your gut's executive order to go fetal in a hole in the ground against your heart's compulsion to avoid being the only coward around.  There were several occasions when I adjusted my expectations for my own personal accomplishments downward and was both content and thankful that my AI buddies would get the job done - which they did.
  
• Hooray for leaning!  Correcting what was the single most heinous UI flaw in MoHAA, CoD allows you to lean.  Not only that, you can lean *and* shoot.  In fact, it's basically a pre-requisite for success.
• The Russian missions in particular struck me as particularly effective.  Perhaps it's due purely to novelty, since the Russian WWII experience hasn't been run into the ground (yet).  But looking back (only days or so after playing the whole game nearly non-stop, including the expansion missions), the Russian missions are about the only thing that hasn't already faded from memory.  The American and British missions were forgotten nearly as soon as I'd completed them.
• The ability to actually aim down the barrel of a weapon.  Every FPS needs to do this.  I can't recall the first game to do this, but I do know that I fell in love with it when I played Viet Cong, which did it exceptionally well.  I'm not sure I fired a single shot in CoD that wasn't aimed using the 'sight' mode rather than the reticle.
  

Bad

• Seemingly haphazard progression.  CoD jumps from mission to mission with seemingly little regard for coherency.  Different times, different places, different armies.  It's difficult to maintain a sense of perspective for what you're doing within the larger tapestry of the overall conflict, and as a player I found myself simply abandoning any attempt to maintain awareness of the bigger picture.  But I'm a history buff, and would have relished a lot more detail and documentary-style material in the mission interludes.  For some reason, the 3 sets of missions in the expansion pack (United Offensive) seemed more cohesive than did the 3 sets in the original, though I can't quite put my finder on an explanation.
  
• Lack of identity.  You are basically the unknown soldier.  The game does little to establish in the player a sense of identity or (and this is the worse crime) any real sense of investment or purpose.  I suppose they've assumed they can take for granted that saving the world from the Nazi Menace(tm) is motivation enough for their set-piece pyrotechnics, but in actuality it isn't.  And largely that's because we've been asked to do it so many times - there is little raw emotion left in just the basic WWII Us-vs-Them backdrop.  The game is already at an identity deficit due to the transitions between the American, British, and Russian missions (which I'm not faulting, conceptually - it's the game's greatest source of variety, a vital ingredient for the same reason).  But nothing is done to counter-balance the jolting disconnect that occurs with every context switch.  Here's how bad it is: throughout the game you do, in fact, have an actual name (one for every soldier you embody), and for the life of me not only can I not remember any of them, but I never even knew what the name was when I was playing.  The AI would literally be yelling my 'name', giving me a specific order or calling my attention to something, and I can't count how many times I wasn't even aware that they were yelling at me.  Part of the problem is the AI was yelling nearly incessantly, and using lots of names.  So something like, "Johnson, take out that sniper", just ended up sounding like white noise.  I'm not even aware that I'm "Johnson", and even if I were, I'm lucky to even hear that with all the mortar shells raining down on me, and even if I could hear it, I'm sort of already busy taking out everything I can see and trying not to overly expose myself in the process.  Anyway, the game's inability to associate a clear identity to the player is another reason why the immersion and the campaign end up being less than they should be.
  

• No downtime.  This might sound like an odd complaint, at first, since the game's objective is clearly to exhilarate through adrenaline hits.  But as any good chef will tell you, you have to clear the palette occasionally or you become numb to the flavor.  CoD never lets up.  It's just scene after scene after scene, with no respite.  Sure, there are brief moments where the action throttles back a bit before redlining again, but that's not enough.  As a perfect counter example, see Viet Cong.  In between missions in VC, you get the chance to just idle and kill some time back at camp.  This actually serves two critical purposes.  First, it provides the reset and relief from the tension-wracked combat sequences, which is what CoD desperately needs.  Second, it does so without breaking character - i.e. it keeps you in the gameworld.  For those wondering why CoD manages a score of only 1 in the immersion category, this is one big reason: CoD never displays any part of the spectrum of being a soldier in WWII besides the hyperbolized combat.  Viet Cong goes out of its way to fill in some of the detail around the combat.  CoD gives us loading screens.
  

Ugly

• Though not quite to the same degree as MoHAA, CoD still suffered the occasional instance where the game degenerated into a ridiculous mockery of 'playing', characterized by having to quickload dozens and dozens of times in order to survive some randomly punitive situation, turning what amounted to maybe 30 seconds of virtual time into a 20 minute session of pure frustration.  More than anything else, this is what kills immersion.  For everything that CoD does right, in terms of meticulously crafting the exquisitely cinematic experience, it's not enough to overcome the poisonous effect of having to retry some stupid little sequence over and over and over and over.  Nothing is cinematic after the 10th consecutive time.  And just like MoHAA, these circumstances can't really be foreseen - they just sort of materialize, and then you're stuck in them, like some kind of loop in space-time.
• Still no blood.  CoD is as sterile as MoHAA, and the effect is as detrimental.  Not only does the bloodless combat wreck serious harm on the (otherwise impeccable) immersion, but I actually feel that it does a great disservice to the game's subject matter.  It makes a mockery of the hell that those soldiers endured.  And the irony here is that clearly Infinity Ward was very conscious of showing respect to the subject matter.  It's obvious that one of their objectives is to exhibit for the player some sense of the courage and sacrifice and sheer terror that was (is) armed combat on a global scale.  Sure, they got their Teen rating from the culture nannies (ESRB), but their game suffers greatly for it.  Do yourself a favor and use one of the available blood mods.  It won't quite provide what's missing, but it's better than nothing.
  

Beautiful

• The B-17 gunner mission in the British portion of the expansion pack instantly became one of my favorite experiences in gaming.  It's sublime.  It was oddly liberating not having to move and take cover, but to simply sit in the gunner's position and do the best that I could to shoot down enemy fighters.  It was visceral and satisfying, whereas the other vehicle sequences tended to wax frustrating.
• The audio design and production is simply amazing.  And I don't even have a particularly snazzy soundcard.  Often after completing a mission, when the symphony of combat terminated abruptly, I would feel like the audio had been bludgeoning me, and I had withstood its onslaught of mighty blows and survived, weary but triumphant.
  

Summary

Not surprisingly, after playing through CoD I feel very similar to how I felt after playing MoHAA: thoroughly impressed with the professionalism and polish applied to nearly every aspect of the game, and simultaneously underwhelmed at the experience, from a gamer's perspective.  These kinds of games have been called 'carnival rides', and it's not an inaccurate analogy.  If you know what it is in advance, and calibrate your expectations accordingly, then there's very little to complain about.  The games says, "hey, I'm not going to ask much from you, and you're in for one heck of a ride!"  And indeed it is one heck of a ride.  It's a spectacle, an assault on the senses.  It is not, however, a game that is particularly challenging or even rewarding, from a gameplay perspective.  These games are like the guards at the gate of gaming - cleanly demarcating the border between traditional passive Hollywood-style entertainment and the vast, untamed hinterlands of truly interactive, emergent experiences.