Call of Duty 2

Call of Duty 2 was the biggest-selling release title for the Xbox 360 just what every console needs, a gritty WWII first-person shooter. Apparently the very nature of the genre, being based on real historical events, is limiting. It's not just reworking a generic dungeon-bash, it's remashing D-Day, again. Yet Call of Duty 2 is still one of the biggest games on Xbox Live. It's got to have something. There's nothing wrong with the one-player game at all; it's just that if you've played Call of Duty (or any other game in the genre) it's going to feel familiar. It's shooting Nazis to complete missions, and everything else is window-dressing. Good window-dressing, though. You'll play through four different scenarios as a soldier in different armies, fighting for England, the U.S., and Russia. There are nice little touches with each situation: as young Private Vasili Ivanovich Koslov, you'll use potatoes as training grenades, given the cash-strapped state of the Russian army. Then you'll join in the claustrophobic house-to-house fighting of the Battle of Leningrad. After that it's on to fighting with tanks at El-Alamein with the British, then taking Pointe du Hoc during D-Day and crossing the Rhine with the Americans. All this shifting about ensures lots of variations on the khaki theme. One little peculiarity of the game is the total lack of saving options. Autosave is it, and the autosave is no more intelligent than in any other game: sometimes, homicidally stupid, like saving seconds before an explosion. Like many seventh generation console titles, Call of Duty 2 concentrates heavily on its online multiplayer content. Xbox Live enables up to twenty-four players playing the same scenario at once, with no discernable lag and a satisfying degree of total chaos. This includes the ability to have four players to a single Xbox, so getting your buddies together to rain metal death is a breeze. There are several different game styles, including the classic solo and team death-matches and Capture the Flag, as well as Headquarters and a bomb-defusing 'Search and Destroy' team scenario. And if you want a change from playing a normal grunt, there are seven different 'kits' to choose from. Scout is particularly fun given Xbox Live's ability to make time-sensitive sniping, well, possible, and people are always going to need Medics. The game's graphics are excellent, and also appropriate to the setting. There's none of that straight out of the box shininess that's so common to textures in seventh generation console games. NPCs can be a little wax-like, but the texture of the skin on your own hands and the gun models, which is what you'll see most often, is convincing. Smoke grenade effects are just gorgeous, and they do their job, too. Sound is also brilliant, and if you have a nice surround-sound system, you'll be hunkering down on your couch as bullets whizz and ping all around you. Call of Duty 2 uses a Battle Chatter System, where you can listen to your computer-generated allies and enemies talking to each other - not just a few lines of dialogue repeated ad nauseum, but actual conversations, sometimes containing useful information. Sound makes a big difference to how immersive a game feels, and Call of Duty 2 has that feel in spades. Combat is pretty simple to learn. Right-trigger gives you a snap-shot, fast and inaccurate. Left trigger leaves you vulnerable briefly as a nice blur effect simulates aiming. You have a melee attack too, and you can throw grenades. As an advance on the original game, you can also throw grenades BACK. If realistic WWII combat games are your thing, Xbox 360's Call of Duty 2 is a winner. It's a thorough and competent solo game, but it really comes into its own online, where it appears to cope brilliantly with the huge demands of highly-detailed multi-player melee combat.