Excellent game - atmospheric, furious and involving......with a few things that aren't quite so good
Overall sound in the game really adds to the atmosphere - weapons all sound and behave reasonably, vehicles look and sound right and the general chatter from your squad mates is judged about right (although in the latter case can be a bit repetitive). The only atmosphere breaker for me was in the British missions (and I could be being picky hree), when as a sergeant you are effectively ordered to do things and addressed by your surname by private soldiers and when certain specific characters are quite unkilleable. Although this was also a problem in CoD 1 I though that it was particularly noticeable here.
Oh yes - and the voice acting isn't great, with the intensly annoying private mcgregor, who I suspect is meant to sound scottish, actually sounding like he has some form of speach impediment.
Further, the same issues raise their heads as is often the case in FPS games of this type. Your squad mates really aren't good enough - their lack of support is often criminally poor and their cpaacity to run across your field of fire increasingly irritating since "friendly fire is not tolerated" and results in game rest to the last save point. The squad element of the game really doesn't work that well and the AI (although not bad) substitutes uncanny accuracy and awareness of your position (even if you are in the deepest cover of all, surprise surpise the germans seem to be alsmost soley interested in focusing their fire on you) for inventive tactics, which in turn makes intelligent tactics and positioning on the player's part, particularly at the harder levesl of the game, a little pointless. Indeed it seems almost to encourage the manic running about that is often seen in multiplayers rather than a more thoughtful tactical approach, which is odd for a game of this type. This is particularly noticeable at Hard and Veteran levels of play, where the difficulty level increase is achieved through increasing German fire to astonishingly accurate levels - nothing original there then. Once of these days game designers are going to move on from the one trick pony and increase difficulty by increasing AI performance and strategy, rather than just through increased accuracy and lethality.
However, this is really nitpicking - CoD2 is really a very good game that, although nothing original, will keep fans of the genre very happy . But nothing really new and rather surpisingly, many of the annoying features of similar, less goo looking games in the genre.