A truly great game that makes you itching for more.
Just like all of the other Call of Duty games you have the choice of playing a short and intense Single Player campaign and a really solid multiplayer. The single Player campaign lets fill the shoes of a Russian, British and American solider and three different campaigns in the war. You first start off playing a Russian convict in the streets of Stalingrad but later on you’ll unlock the British campaign that lets you play, for the first time in a WW2 game, in the rocky soil of the desert in Africa! And later unlock the American campaign.
Just like in the original, you have a compass that shows you where your objectives are but unlike in the first CoD you can do these objectives in any order that you want. Which can make the game more forgiving from being to linear. You’ll also find out that some of the missions can be a pain in the back to do, so if you are ever stuck on a mission in the Russian campaign you can always jump on a different one from lets say the British campaign. The AI is also great, which can be seen more from your allies. They’ll tell you where the Germans are or warn you that there’s a grenade. It just adds to the authenticity.
After you’re done with the Single Player you can always jump right into the Multiplayer part of the game, which is just so damn fun. There’s 5 multiplayer modes to play which include Headquaters, Search and Destroy, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag. Unlike other MP games, CoD 2 lets you jump right into the battles; mainly because the maps aren’t overly scaled but that doesn’t mean they aren’t good. Every map is just as detailed as the Single Player. There is also the feature of in-game voice, if you have a mic hook it up and then press the Z key and talk with other gamers; though it only works with servers that support it and it’s a very poor system.
The game play is just superb, you actually feel like you’re shooting an M1 Grand down to suppress some Nazis on the other side of that wall. Every thing is so detailed, from the guns to the buildings you’ll encounter. When playing you do feel like you’re fighting the war, the sound of guns a blazing and soldiers running for cover is just a great experience.
I did have a few minor gripes, first was, yeah you guessed it, the health bar system. Your basically a Superman out on the field, if you get shoot enough times the screen starts to go red and you need to take cover somewhere to regenerate your health. It’s bacially like the Halo Health system but it works. I’ll have to get use to it. And I did encounter a few bugs, mostly from the Single Player campaign. But all in all Call of Duty two is just plain solid. You won’t regret buying the game and you surely won’t regret playing it.