Reviews of Call of Duty 2 - Xbox 360

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Call of Duty 2 takes you into the trenches of World War II, starting with the frozen tundra of Russia under attack. High realism levels really draw you into the combat.

You start out as a raw Russian recruit, in the freezing winter of Moscow, trying to learn how to use a rifle and stave off the impending Nazi take-over. You only get a few moments of training before you're sent out into combat to defend your home town.

The graphics are a really nice mix of realistic scenery and helpful gameplay. Items you need will glow gold so that they're easy to find. A compass on your display will point your way to important objectives. Your ammo, health and other indicators are easy to find.

But in the meantime, your main screen graphics are really quite impressive. From the brickwork on the buildings to the smoke-grenade haze, from the uniforms on your friends and enemies, the quality on a HD TV is quite impressive. The widescreen view lets you keep an eye all around you while you move your way through hostile territory. You try to focus while you hear the screams, calls, bullet blasts and grenade booms landing all around you. It's like being in a warzone, which of course it is.

Your teammates are all around you, and they do their best to help you out. Like you, many of them are raw recruits and not very good at things. As you move forward, they get more skilled, as do you. You learn how to pause before aiming, how to use cover and to approach your objective with stealth.

I do wish that you could have more than 8 simultaneous players online during XBox Live. The single player games are great, but of course they don't last forever. When you get through them, the next step is to start playing online to face a "real challenge" with live players. The game would be SUPERB if it let you play large squad on large squad. Maybe that could come with future upgrades. Still, at least playing with 8 people lets you keep enjoying the graphics, the gameplay and the skill set. It's always far more challenging to play against live players rather than playing against a computer set. Computers are great for training, but live players are where the long term enjoyment of a game shines through.

Highly recommended for war game lovers, especially those who enjoy squad-type combat. If you hook up with a team of like-minded online players, this could provide for countless months of online fun, as you face your squad against other highly skilled teams.

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After playing the PC version of the first call of duty, and the expansion pack, I didn't quite know what to expect from the xbox 360 version. On the PC the game is smooth, precise, exciting, and overall a great deal of fun.

This game does not disappoint on the xbox 360. The battles are unbelievable. They are epic, fierce, and make you really feel like you're there at times. The pace is fairly adjustable since you can play to your play style for the most part. On most difficulty levels you can run and gun or sit back and play the sniper or let your boys do some of the work, etc. The easiest difficulty level is really, really easy. However, the veteran difficulty is really, really hard (but not unplayable, it's actually very fun because of the realism).

The online component is equally enjoyable. You can play with up to eight players in a few different kinds of matches. The levels are great (some are from older versions), and the competition online is good. I do notice major lag issues in about 25% of the games I play. When it does lag it's basically unplayable. However, I just jump out of that game, into another room and it's fine. Without lag, it's probably the best online game I've ever played.

They definitely need to do some work on the online ranking system (it doesn't work at all) and the online "lobby" (there isn't one). But the actual gameplay online is crisp and exciting.

I purchased most of the launch titles for the Xbox 360. This one is definitely my favorite so far. Some of the other games are solid, but this one is the most fun both online and off.

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EDIT: Below I make comments about the multiplayer and it is the multiplayer that has reduced my score from 5 to 4 stars. According to IGN, the developers are working on a patch that will, at least, fix the lag. Chances are it will change the way you find groups *crosses fingers*. I will continue to update this to reflect the latest news.

There are a couple of FPSs to think about during Xbox 360's launch. Call of Duty 2 is probably the more exciting and thrilling of these launch titles, boasting beautiful graphics, fast game play and silky smooth controls. If you have HD, it is even better. I never truly understood the difference in picture quality until I saw the game running side by side on a HD and a regular TV and it is remarkable.

The game is broken down into two categories, the single player and the multiplayer. The single player game is intense. It drops you in the middle of three campaigns and things heat up from there. It feels like you are in the middle of a war-torn battlefield. The immersion is great. Your teammates are actually decent, the enemies will pick up and throw back grenades at you that you have already thrown. Sometimes the enemy AI is pretty stupid but overall it is really well implemented. Every mission feels like war is being thrown in your face. Its do or die and the bullets are whizzing by. Its incredibly intense and exciting. Every mission should have you trying to catch your breath by the end.

The sound is amazing, particularly on a surround sound equipped TV. In the single player and in the multiplayer it is incredibly useful. For example, if you are playing multiplayer and hear footsteps behind you but your radar doesn't indicate any friendlies near you, you might want to turn around. This has saved my life countless times. That is, unless the enemy is crouch-walking and silent, which is another story...

The part of the game that is so important right now is the online portion. And unfortunately, this is where the "flawed" part of my title comes into play. Multiplayer is a lot of fun. The games are quick moving, finding a room is (with exception explained below) simple and usually quick. Getting into the action is great. There is a huge assortment of levels and a lot of different gametypes from death match (and team DM), search and destroy, HQs, etc etc. You will find something fun here level-wise and setting wise. Using the weapons again is smooth and control is great.

The gameplay tends to run slow than Halo 2 (for those who played Halo 2). I happen to like this type of gameplay. Instead of just running around aimlessly shooting your guns until your ammo is depleted, you have to think. Its more realistic. The shades of your costumes usually match the setting and so you have to have your wits about you. The war-torn cities are amazing and produce some agonizingly intense matchs where you never know where that sniper is until he shoots (the radar only picks up enemies that shoot). Its slower paced but I absolutely love it and would have it no other way.

Its too bad that some design flaws keep this game from being a perfect 5 stars. The biggest flaw is that they didn't take a page from Halo 2. Halo 2 has probably the very best console way of finding people, playing with your friends and keeping in contact. Call of Duty 2 has none of this. If you have friends that want to play with you, you can't start a party and keep them together. What ends up happening is, one person will have to find a game and everyone else will have to go into their dashboard on the person's name and click "join game in session" and hope that they get in before the game finds its 8 people.

When the mission is over, you have to do this again. After completing a match, the game kicks you back to the pre-lobby screen where you go to find another match. You can't stick together with your friends nor with people you just played with. Why did they do this? I can't fathom any reason for this other than they didn't have enough time to successfully implement it. It is irritating trying to get your friends to play with you when the system isn't built around it.

Another glaring flaw is the server stability. I can't count how many times someone has joined the game and the server lags. Lags to the point that when your character moves, it makes you feel like you're drunk, stumbling around everywhere. Also, sometimes joining a game is a pain because of the "server full" notices or other error messages that pop up. Sometimes it takes 3 or 4 or so tries to actually get into the pre-game lobby.

Another problem is that when you get into the game you are able to decide which team or let the computer auto-assign. This is great in theory; unfortunately, what ends up happening is you have a team of 5 against a team of 3 or worse. Then people can switch over teams at will which can cause confusion and can make some of the games underbalanced.

A final problem is part server problems part user problems. A lot of times you start out with a full match of 8 people, but by the end of the match you are down to 2 vrs 2. Or 1 vrs 2. People either disconnect due to the server or just plain leave. And it is very annoying to those of us who are trying to just have fun when all of a sudden 3/4 of your team is gone but the other side still has a full team.

I have been pretty harsh on the multiplayer but I stand by it. It has the potential to be the best mutliplayer experience on the 360 for a long time coming (particularly with the very believable possibility that Halo 3 won't be launching until the Halo movie comes out in 2007) but the design flaws and server stability issues really hurt it. The actual game design helps keep this game a solid 4 star game; its definitely above average. I just wish they could fix the other problems that would help this game soar. Right now, I have to recommend purchasing this game. Just keep in mind there are problems that can and probably will annoy you.

Honest reviews on Call of Duty 2 - Xbox 360

"Call of Duty" lovers will be eagerly awaiting the arrival of another "United Offensive" Expansion pack after finishing this stunning WWII fps. In 2004 the next best single player shooter to "Half-Life 2" was "Call of Duty 1". Needless to say COD2 brings us yet another damn fine sequel effort to rival anything else on the shelf. COD has firmly taken over where "Medal of Honour: Allied Assault" first got our attention in trying to recreate the "Saving Private Ryan" experience for us all. The COD series is built on the same concept as MOH except there is more action, more high-octane moments and a very different type of enemy AI. COD2 has upgraded the enemy and platoon squad AI from COD1 so that your comrades can identify the enemy and instead of scripting each action sequence as in COD1, COD2 depends on AI so that a rerun of any level will play differently although the situations remain the same. COD2 also has a lot more going on in terms of what you can pilot and drive although not freely but as part of the storyline. COD2 retains all the cinematic intensity that its predecessor successfully claimed and even expands on each of the earlier episodes over the course of a four year WWII period to give us Moscow 1941 Red Army Training, Demolition, Stalingrad 1942 Repairing the Wire, The Pipeline, Stalingrad 1943 Downtown Assault, City Hall, Comrade Sniper, El Alamein 1942 The Diversionary Raid, Hold the Line, Operation Supercharge, El Daba 1942 The End of the Beginning, Libya 1943 Crusader Charge, 88 Ridge, Tunisia 1943 Outnumbered and Outgunned, Retaking Lost Ground, Assault on Matmata, D-Day 1944 The Battle of Pointe du Hoc, Retreat? We're Advancing in Another Direction, The Silo, Caen 1944 Prisoners of War, The Crossroads, The Tiger, The Brigade Box, Hill 400 1944 Approaching Hill 400, Rangers Lead the Way, The Battle for Hill 400 and Germany 1945 Crossing the Rhine, where you get to play as either a Soviet or a Brit or as a member of the US forces. Missions range from basic training, defending against attacks, counterattacks, planting explosives, repairing cut field wires, contacting HQ via the field phone, disabling Panzer II tanks, crawling through pipelines, taking out enemy snipers, destroying fuel barrel supplies with some of the best explosion effects seen in any game to date, destroying ammo depot supplies, gathering enemy documents, defending lower lines by using close-range weapons and artillery support, clearing out bunkers, radioing in for artillery bombardments, taking a Mosque, driving tanks, holding out for 5 minutes till support arrives, clearing the buildings in the town, sniping the artillery crews from a Silo tower, finding wounded Americans, transporting the wounded, taking a farmhouse and barn, taking out mortar crews and if that is not enough... securing a hill from a German advance. The smoke effects are absolutely photorealistic and have set a new benchmark for graphics quality. The textures might let the game down a small bit, including very blocky building designs or similar house interiors that are repeated at several points in the game but the environments and maps are genuinely war like all the way through and can not be faulted. The enemy AI and your own team AI are much more realistic than COD1 and your team is reliable. If you get too close to the enemy you will engage him in close quarter combat. Although Call of Duty was never meant to be a war simulation, but more of a 1st person war adventure, to be honest, does exactly what it says on the tin. So apart from the staged element, which actually ads to the game, it is more of an experience than a game you will turn to time and time again, however it is worth it for the experience of the single player mission alone. It is also much longer than COD1 and OU, where COD1 had a 1.5 day game span and UO had 3, COD2 will last you for well over a week if you play one mission a day. The pandemonium of war is all here in a spectacular fashion because the story is a winner as you play a mini version of BAND OF BROTHERS and ENEMY AT THE GATES. Like COD1 you even feel loss at the end but for some reason the connection to your comrades in COD1 was a lot stronger because it was more scripted. The AI detracts from that connection a little bit, but I am only cribbing.

Pros:

Cinematic gaming.

Best new war game and a worthy 1st person shooter.

Awesome war atmosphere.

Smoky explosions.

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First, the gameplay in Xbox live is excellent. No major glitches and shots are realistic based on the weapon you choose. You can literally pick any gun and get good with it on any level.

Now, for the bad. This game needs an Xbox Live patch BAD!!

Apparently Activision wasn't aware that Xbox live exists until a couple weeks before they released this game :)

If you are interested in playing mainly the online version of this game I would recommend holding off until/if they upgrade the live gameplay for the following reasons:

1. The host is apparently chosen by random so most games lag really bad.

2. When you are with a good host, you can only play in the one round and then the game shuts down and you have to go find another host. There is no option for a host to set up a room and continually host games. After each game, the room closes down and must be re-setup. I have a business internet connection and can host maximum number of players without lag but there is no option for me to establish myself as host. I may randomly get selected only if there is not another room already set up to join.

3. There is really no point of a friends list in this game. I enjoy playing with friends. However, since every room is shut down at the end of a round, it's pretty much impossible to play with the same group of people for more than one round at a time. After the round you are stuck trying to find another game with no lag (about 1 in 3 have no lag) then invite your friends in (if there is room) only to have the room close down again after the round. Then try to keep your sanity and repeat the steps above. Seriously, I only get about 10 good minutes of game play for every 30 minutes I spend trying to find a room

4. There is a VERY ANNOYING issue with trying to reconnect to a new game if you leave a game in progress. I routinely get a "Cannot Connect" error for about 5 minutes after leaving a game. I don't want to leave games but have to due to heavy lag. Very frustrating.

5. About 1 game in 10 I get connected to the WRONG GAME FORMAT. I'll choose to play a Team Deathmatch and get connected to a Capture the Flag game.

Finally if you are not interested in Xbox Live, this is an AWESOME game. However, if you are, it appears Activision did not do their homework prior to releasing this game to determine the standard features that gamers like when playing live.