Whether through starvation, disease, or shrapnel, the death toll on the eastern front was a different level of brutality and scale compared to rest of the war in Europe. Call of Duty: Vanguard Call of Duty: Vanguard gameplay premiere shows off insane Stalingrad Campaign mission. In this war, everything has gone to shit, and even the people telling you what to do are trying to kill you. You aren’t on a noble crusade on the side of good. In the end, the clash between his attempts at inspiration and the surrounding chaos make his words ring hollow.
He even joins in the shooting of would-be deserters. And you get a front row seat to the commitment Stalin’s Commissars bring to the table.Īs the speech progresses, waves from explosions send the small craft lurching, men two feet away from him are killed from stray gunfire, and the Commissar doesn’t even skip a beat. He implores you: “Do not count days, do not count miles, count only the number of Germans you have killed,” an echo of real-life Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg’s advice in his 1942 poem, titled “Kill.” It’s what happens when you get two nations led by brutal dictators with effective propaganda departments and no regard for human lives.
You are a Russian conscript who has never fired a rifle, packed into a rowboat with other men who are terrified out of their minds, paddling your way to a city literally on fire as the skies above you crack open with the hellish din of shrapnel and human screams during one of World War II’s bloodiest conflicts. You aren’t the US Marines or the British SAS. In Finest Hour’s first level, you are not a well equipped, trained killing machine. Call of Duty: Finest Hour’s opening speech, delivered by a Soviet political officer, captures the brutality, anger, and zealotry of World War II’s eastern front as a stark contrast to American-centric FPS campaigns.
Welcome to the greatest moment of your life.īefore Call of Duty was about unbridled machismo, mercenary robots, and anti-gravity firefights using golden camo double laser shotguns, it was a series about normal people fighting and dying in extraordinary circumstances. This week in Speech Check, our semi-regular mini-series on the most memorable speeches in video games, Peter takes us to Stalingrad via Call of Duty: Finest Hour.