Call of Duty United Offensive is an expansion pack for the first Call of Duty. Once again we will take on the role of three different soldiers from the USA, UK and Russia respectively. We start things off as the Americans in a snow covered Belgium. The snow doesn’t make any difference to the gameplay but it is something that wasn’t in the base game so it does give United Offensive its own style. You will quickly find out that this expansion has much more fierce and unpredictable battles. It will keep you on your toes and raises the difficulty quite high right from the beginning. UO introduces a couple of new guns like silenced machine guns and flamethrowers for your Nazi killing pleasure. They are uncommon unfortunately, I would have loved for more time to use the flamethrower.
Like the original you are nearly always accompanied by fellow soldiers and this time around they are a lot more useful. They can hold their own and are way more likely to actually kill the people shooting at them. It may be due to AI improvements or the fact that you will be spending a lot of your time in this expansion fighting in close quarters. UO has much more fighting in villages and condensed spaces so carrying a weapon suited for that is a must. Unfortunately some levels spawn way too enemies out of the same locations which makes shooting them kind of tedious as another Nazi will sprout out of thin air to take their place until it is time to move on. It also features far more moments were you must defend a location for a given amount of time which almost starts to feel like it’s there to pad out the story.
It took me 6 hours to beat the story which is quite close to what it took me to get through the base game. No longer are the three Allies campaigns intertwined together instead you play through the whole American campaign then switch to the British when it is done. I much prefer it this way as it helps you keep track of the characters and makes the journey much more consistent than randomly teleporting your view to different events like in the base game. In the British campaign you will be riding in both a boat and a warplane. The plane section is pretty cool as it has you running in the interior to pilot different turrets and fix issues but it goes on too long and both vehicle sections just play out with you endlessly shooting from a turret.
Russian campaign does allow you to pilot a tank which was a fun distraction. It also lets you call in artillery strikes via binoculars at one point but you have to look at a very specific point and it comes off as nothing more than a gimmick. Fortunately the main bulk of the levels are very good and have been designed as to challenge returning players from the base game. Whether this difficulty is a good thing is up for debate but from my experience it kept it from feeling like this expansion was just more of the same even though it pretty much is. I don’t believe it has any new additions to the soundtrack either which is disappointing as the composer is amazing.
Overall United Offensive tries new things but it is very much more of the same. If they would have toned down the padding thrown in to make the story seem longer I would say these campaigns surpass the ones found in the original. The multiplayer seems to have very few people left and some servers have bots to fill up the lobby. It is completely separate from the base game so the already small amount of people still playing CoD1 and UO have been split. You will need Call of Duty 1 to play United Offensive, this is not a stand-alone expansion pack. At the end of the day this is still a lengthy and exciting expansion pack that knows what made the original so good and made it better. Recommended to those that have completed the original and would like to take the fight to previously unseen countries like Italy and Belgium.
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