Soldier! It is time for you to be prepared for battle! Ready yourself, because I have an important mission for you.
NotCoD is the newest game from the folks that brought out NotGTAV. NotCoD is a satirical take on the Call of Duty series, and definitely takes the jokes to the max. Much like with NotGTAV, I have never played a CoD game before, so I went into this game without knowing what all of the satire was based off of.
As of the writing of this review, all that’s been released thus far is Episode 1 – Call of Judy. After a not-so-short tutorial (that you can skip if desired), you are tossed into an ever changing mission that culminates in needing to find the Judy File. Spread across a handful of levels, you’ll need to shoot down a lot children, nuns, and devils in order to get your hands on it.
NotCoD is a side-scrolling run-n-gun sort of game. You need to work through groups of enemies, all on a mission to kill you, using the guns, ammo, and grenades you find along the way. Playing on controller, I found that it was often hard to actually aim where I wanted, leading to a lot of missed shots. Ammo is fairly plentiful, but if you use one of the guns that is limited on ammo, you may find yourself quickly running out.
One of the biggest issues I had with NotCoD was how long the levels dragged on. It felt like the satirical part of the level was done and over with within the first 5 minutes of the level. Despite that, the levels just felt like they just dragged the same joke on and on for far too long. This really made it start to seem hard to even finish the game, especially since even the final boss fell into this trap of just being much longer than it really needed to be.
Much like with NotGTAV, NotCoD features entirely hand-drawn art. I really enjoyed the art for what it is, and it’s definitely something that helps with not taking the game “too seriously”. All of the music and sound effects are also done with only the use of voiced effects. The sound department is one area in which I feel the game didn’t do that well, since you can get completely overwhelmed in noises when there’s a lot of enemies on the screen. Every single enemy say stuff when they enter the screen and attack. This can really make the sounds in this game hard on your ears after a not-so-very short period of time.
Another issue I found with the game is that it doesn’t like to save whichever settings you last used. There’s an option to turn flashing images on or off (on by default), and every time you launch the game it turns back to on. I forgot to fix this one time going into the final boss, and one of the phases during it was brutal until I turned it back on. The game also has issues remembering between mouse and controller whenever you leave the menu, and it just sticks to whichever method you used to close the menu.
NotCoD has a lot of promise in it with the satire, but there’s just a lot of issues lying within it right now. The levels feel far too dragged out, the sound can get extremely overwhelming, and it has issues with remembering selected options. I do also wish the game had a proper windowed mode resolutions instead of keeping it at a fullscreen resolution. I’m hoping that Episode 2 of NotCoD will see a lot of these issues cleaned up, but for now with just Episode 1, it’s stuck in the weird limbo place of I’d like to recommend it but there’s too many different issues.
NotCoD (Episode 1 – Call of Judy) Review Score
2.5/5
I would like to thank NotGames for providing me with a key for review purposes.
