Thursday 29-Jul-2004 4:58 PM Battle across land, sea and air - we get hands-on with Gray Matter's expansion pack Activision's recent Activate event in Barcelona, Spain, had plenty to captivate this year, but being the slightly sad Call of Duty junkies that we are, new expansion pack United Offensive was always going to be near the top of our wish-lists.
Already primed with some welcome examples of the B-17 bomber mission from this year's E3, Gray Matter didn't disappoint with two new never-seen-before selections from the US and British campaigns.
The first was drawn from the US Battle of the Bulge campaign and begins as your 101st Airborne squad hitches a ride towards the occupied town of Noiville on the back of a couple of Sherman tanks.
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Your squad leader, Captain Foley, provides a rough briefing as the Shermans slowly grind towards the outskirts, but Military intelligence has few concrete details, other than it's almost certainly occupied by a substantial German force.
It's an assumption that you're soon able to test in earnest, as Foley orders your squad into a direct, fast-moving assault on the stone-built village. Leaping from the back of the tank, it's a quick sprint through the ruined wall of a house and into the village proper. It's no surprise to find winter-camouflaged Germans aplenty occupying the tight confines of the maze of inter-linked houses.
Vicious close-quarter combat quickly ensues, with your squad engaging the Germans at an average range of ten to twenty feet as you clear room after room of white-clad Nazi troopers.
With your buddies providing close support, you're soon loosing off mag after mag, lobbing hand-grenades down corridors and even occasionally resorting to some hand-to-hand rifle butt checks - but it's soon clear that United Offensive displays all the series' superb trademark 'no man stands alone' squad-based gameplay.
Our demonstration alas ended all too soon, as our squad cleared the final house, only for explosions to rock the building, quite literally bringing down the house down, as we were trapped in the cellar by falling debris.
Still, even back then, there's few places the US couldn't go and Foley quickly detailed an engineer to blow our way out with a satchel charge. As the explosives brought down an outside wall, our squad charged through the dust and confusion to outflank the German defenders and bring into view Noiville's heavily fortified Chateau, our ultimate objective.
We'd love to tell you more, but alas, there endeth the demo, although we did learn that the next phase would be to capture the Chateau and then defend it from a fierce German counter-attack.
But fortunately we were able to move on and sample another slice of the United Offensive action in the form of a new British mission drawn from the invasion of Sicily campaign.
You can see a few tantalising details in the screens here, but before the invasion proper can begin, a joint SAS/SOE special ops force comprising both you and Major Ingrams (remember him from the original CoD?) have been detailed to blow up some German coastal defence batteries, in a classic Guns of Navarone-style operation.
We joined the action towards the latter end of the mission, where, having already infiltrated the base and planted a large cache of explosives, our two-man team was now trying to extricate themselves from the mission area.
Unfortunately our escape route had been compromised, but British SOE operatives are nothing if not resourceful and it's the work of mere moments to purloin a German E-boat and power out of the harbour. With Ingrams at the helm and ourselves manning the forward machine gun, we headed for the safety of the open sea, but of course no escape could be that easy and Nazi patrol boats were quickly in hot pursuit.
With Ingrams swinging the boat left and right, we're soon raking them with machine gun fire and we counted six destroyed enemy E-boats before we finally broke the blockade. As our boat motored towards freedom, the cliff top emplacements erupted as our explosives' timer finally ran down in a truly spectacular finale. There's one major obstacle to the invasion removed - permanently.
So even though the reins has moved on from Infinity Ward to Gray Matter, United Offensive looks well on the way to becoming a hugely successful expansion pack and achieving the ambition of bringing the CoD experience of total warfare across all the land, sea and air fronts.
With additional vehicles, ten new multiplayer maps and three freshly announced multiplayer game modes of Domination, CTF and Base Assault, things seems to be shaping up rather nicely on all fronts, as United Offensive launches its own invasion for CoD fans' hearts and minds later this year.
