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i know COD WAW is one of them where it has the best portrayal of the soviets, but the other COD games where you also get to play as the soviets/red army soldier like in the original COD (COD 2003) and in COD 2 - are they just as good? or at least, not as problematic as with the newer cod games?
because i refuse to play any game that's just pure crystallized american state propaganda and talks shit about the USSR. fuck off with that shit.
no, there isnt.
dont play games that glorify war honestly, not trying to grandstand you as I do and have done but COD is an american propoganda slopfest at best and just re-writes history at worst, like blaming Russia for the highway of death during the gulf war somehow. (insane)
......i know this.
hence why i said "not as problematic as with the newer cod games? because i refuse to play any game that’s just pure crystallized american state propaganda and talks shit about the USSR"
because i know that after cod waw, it starts to dive deep into us propaganda territory.
i only made this post to know if the games with soviet campaigns (classic cod games like cod 2003 and cod 2) are good or not, since i haven't picked them up yet but would still like to know beforehand, since there's no leftist reviewer out there.
jesus.
To answer your question, Call of Duty 2 is alright. You'll run into some tropes here or there, but nothing egregious. Mainly stuff along the lines of your officer giving you potatoes to use for throwing practice instead of training grenades. The game is a simple, fun, arcade shooter.
Call of Duty 1 is much much worse and I would stay away from it, mainly because its very unpolished and not fun.
I pretty much had to give up shooting games in general as I got older, because it just felt so gross. There’s a few exceptions like Deep Rock Galactic, but even then I just don’t really enjoy my primary method of interaction with the world being shooting things anymore. It’s gauche, and I think my love of them earlier in life contributed to my anger issues and lib regression from a youth of radical organizing.
What you are looking for is Call of Duty: World at War. You have two campaigns, one being American and focused on the Pacific, and the second being Soviet and focused on the Eastern Front.
From what I remember, there is very little, if any, historical revisionism or state department propaganda, so you won't run into something along the lines of the Soviets randomly committing war crimes to show how "barbaric" they are or other garbage similar to that. The American campaign also doesn't just hype America up to be this unstoppable war machine that was single-handedly responsible for winning WW2.
Every so often I'll go back and replay the game due to how incredibly cathartic they make mowing down droves of Nazis. Storming the Reichstag is definitely my favorite part by far from both campaigns. Just watching the Nazi Eagle get hit with a rocket before tumbling down from the rafters and crushing the SS men taking cover behind Hitler's podium is amazing. Not to mention the ending scene itself.
Well, there is still a little bit of "Soviet barbarism" where they have either the player or Soviet NPCs kill surrending Germans, but at least the message is more along the lines of "war is brutal" rather then "Russia/communism bad".
True, but that's not displayed as inherent to the Soviets or even unreasonable to a degree. The German brutality is talked about and displayed frequently, and the actions of the Soviets are displayed as a righteous anger in response to an invasion and suffering at the hands of an incredibly evil enemy. War is hell, and I feel that the game demonstrated the brutality of the conflict well. The US and Japan also shown engaging in that same brutality in the Pacific Campaign, so its not something unique to the Soviet missions.
Even then, moments like the one you talk about are rare, and preceded by a lot of context. For example, the scene where the group of SS soldiers attempt to surrender and you have the option to burn or shoot them, comes directly after an entire mission of that SS unit fighting savagely and repeatedly killing captured or surrendered Soviet troops, and then only surrendering because they attempted to escape into the metro system but were cut off and surrounded.
Or even the scene at the beginning of "Their land, their blood", where Rheznov gives you the option of shooting the Germans bleeding out on the floor, comes after those same Germans beat you, a captured soldier, senseless, and were preparing to execute you. Which they were only prevented in doing because of the Red Army's arrival.
I was very young when I played the earlier CODs, but I don't really remember much political commentary on the eastern front missions. It was mostly for the set pieces and different equipment. And also getting called comrade a lot.
In one of them the first mission for the soviets you get ammo without a rifle and get shot if you go backwards
Damn how did I forget that
the first mission for the soviets you get ammo without a rifle
...? why?
get shot if you go backwards
i guess to prevent desertion from your comrades?
idk, i need more context (or i need to play the game) to understand this more clearly.
It's classic western propaganda about the USSR that every 2 men shared a rifle and that they shot up soldiers who surrendered or retreated, both are fake and don't have any truth to them, I think this video mentions it
huh. weird thing to use as propaganda. where did this originate from?
~~The USSR actually killed deserters, but it was rare and in deseperation~~ (read salad), the rifles thing was explained in the video I think, what happened was the soviet soldiers got put in a place with half the required rifles then later more rifles came and they all had rifles
The USSR did not actually kill retreating men in the field. Blocking detachments were mainly made up of the worst soldiers in a unit and were primarily used to round up malingerers and send them back to the front. There were also roughly 100-250 men in each blocking detachment, and each group was expected to enforce no-retreat orders on a regiment of roughly 40,000-50,000 men. The primary politcal goal of blocking detachments was to persuade officers from ordering panicked retreats in order to prevent the front line from collapsing. If individual units needed to fall back, they would be allowed to.
If a solider was suspected of serious desertion, they would be arrested and tried under court martial, not shot on the spot.
The only caveat to this is that Penal troops were followed by armed NKVD officers which would kill them on the spot for attempting to either surrender to the Germans, or escape from captivity.
yeah
Early in the war, Germany overran many Soviet divisions and their armament stockpiles leaving many troops without ammunition and oftentimes even rifles. This led to many Soviet divisions that survived the initial invasion being woefully under-equipped and significantly weaker then they appeared on paper; which in turn, led to further military disasters, notably around Minsk and Kiev.
However, by the start of the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, these logistical failures had been fixed for months and no longer plagued Soviet front line units. In fact, the Southern front had an overabundance of weapons and ammunition, and a severe lack of manpower due to the fighting around Leningrad and Moscow sucking up all available reserves.
In addition to what other people posted, WWI was a source of the "1 rifle, 2 men" myth. Because WWI was fucking awful. Multiple countries had logistical problems. Sometimes your daily rations would be a bullet and a slice of bread. This was especially true for Russia, who managed to lose despite being on the winning side of the war.
One of the catalysts for the Russian Revolution were the conditions of WWI. It was the second major war the Romanovs dragged their country into where they weren't prepared and were defeated within living memory (the Crimean War being the other).
There were often supply shortages during that time, but western filmmakers are derpshits and got it confused with things in WWII because it was convenient post-war as Cold War propaganda. This was made worse by Germans being the only sources of information regarding the Eastern front prior to the collapse of the USSR and opening of the soviet archives to Western historians. Nazis being nazis came up with all kinds of excuses as to why they lost while insisting their enemies were weaklings.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
comrade 🥹7
woa alunya is back 
hello comrade 
It has been a while since I watched anybody try the first Call of Duty, but there were several instances where the Soviets shot retreaters, and I vaguely remember the Soviet missions depicting the ‘human wave’ stereotype in a few scenes. I’d have to watch a longplay to be sure. The Soviet missions were not nearly as angsty as Company of Heroes 2, but there were some irksome moments.
Welcome back comrade! I wondered where you went!
Sadly, I don't have any recommendations. I just came here to say welcome back.
Awww, thank you so much comrade. It's very sweet of you to welcome me back.
I'm going to make a post someday detailing why I left and what happened while I left. I want to talk about it.
I hope you've been doing well though, and that life has been kind to you!
Not sure you're going to find a CoD that isn't American propaganda, even the WWII ones have propaganda as other people pointed out
Advanced Warfare has you end up fighting a genocidal megacorporation superpower run by an American (though you end up fighting alongside the US Army against it)
Infinite Warfare has you play as American but you're at least not fighting an existing enemy group, you're fighting against cartoonishly evil space fascists lol
Also, avoid Call of Duty WWII (the 2017 one), that one doesn't even have a Soviet campaign lol, it's rather hilarious how much that one goes straight to "America won WWII" when the older CoDs were pretty good about not doing that
I've played too much CoD so I can go on a lot about these games lol
Mod FNV to hell and pretend you are the last communist standing in New California Republic
Every CoD game is US imperialist propaganda.
games where you also get to play as the soviets/red army soldier
Hell Let Loose, multiplayer wwii shooter with eastern front maps and a soviet faction.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Enlisted too, but be warned of the "balancing" based on giving every German tanker a tiger 2, and every infantryman an assault rifle like STG, MP-43, FG-42 or MKB-42. Their planes suck, tho.
If it's Warmerican and well known, then it's full of Warmerican propaganda. Maybe try a Russian or Chinese game.
Maybe try a Russian or Chinese game.
Okay. Do you have any suggestions?