Developed by Treyarch and first published by Activision in 2005, Call of Duty 2: Big Red One is a console-only adaptation of the second Call of Duty game. It was released for GameCube, PlayStation 2 and XBox.

Big Red One is a historical First-Person Shooter based on The Second World War, focusing solely on the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division – the so-called “Big Red One“, because their insignia features a large, red number one. There are no other allied campaigns, as there have been in all previous CoD games.

You follow “the route of the fighting first”, into North Africa, Sicily, the landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day, through France and eventually into Germany.

The game has a single-player story mode campaign, and a range of multiplayer modes, although these are all online – there’s unfortunately no split screen. Whether it’s still possible to play them on the PlayStation Network or not, I do not know. I very much doubt it.

Big Red One uses the ‘Treyarch NGL Engine‘ and manages to conjure up a believable world of warfare, although – to be honest – the environments and missions are nowhere near as good as those in the PC version of Call of Duty 2.

Gameplay-wise, I do still struggle mentally with gamepads and First-Person Shooters (and I’m using a real gamepad to play this – not keyboard), so I find the going a bit frustrating. But not horribly so.

Not really where I would start when recommending a Call of Duty game. Big Red One is good, but it’s for console shooter fans only, really. If you’re a PC user then you’re going to find the gameplay in this to be sluggish. Not in a ‘frame rate’ sense, but in a ‘slow-to-aim’ sense.

More: Call of Duty 2: Big Red One on Wikipedia