Well, well, well worth playing (with some patience). Read the review to find out why. It's long yet pretty accurate.

User Rating: 9.3 | SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALs PS2
By enzof660 | Review Date:
So I bought Socom 1 and I absolutely loved it. Till this day I havn't beaten it since if anyone's played the first one, the 2nd to last mission in the cave is hard as hell, but whatever. I'm here to talk about the Socom II game...so let's talk. The gameplay is just plain fun and trust me, with all the different weapons that are and become available to you, there's plenty of fun in going back to different missions and messing around in different ways. Weapons in this game include classes of pistols, submachine guns, assault rifles, macine guns, sniper rifles, and then your equpment which consists of grenades, mines, and an RPG or two if you wanna. These weapons all perform differently, and due to the level of difference between weapons and classes, every individual can find their own few weapons that they just happen to be good with. Some weapons recoil more but fire faster and vice-versa, therefore making for a hell of a selection and range of comfort. Each weapon looks distinctly different, so if you're interested and just happen to learn what each one is and looks like, you should be able to identify any weapon if you happen to step over the one that was dropped by the person you smoked a littler earlier. If you don't know which it is, it'll tell you when you step over it. It has the same system as the first one in which actions can be initiated by scrolling through a small set of pictures (if any set at all) that show you what the action is. Now this is all fine and dandy seeing as how that system was never a problem to begin with (for me anyway). The single player will basically having you go through 3 mission campaigns in 4 different A.O.s (Areas of Operation) which include Albania, Brazil, Algeria, and Russia. The locales themselves range from desolate and frigid arctic weather to urban, poverty ridden city streets, to rural country sides. All the areas are very well covered and very well animated. You'll always feel like a squadron of SEALs really belongs. The game goes on 5 different difficulties which reward you for beating the game on each time. You may be rewarded by being given more weapons to choose from for SP missions or by being given bonus character models for online use. SP really holds its own in this game next to the online. Now online diserves its own small section. The online for this game can be very fun and rewarding, or it can be very aggrivating and tedious, depending on you patience and tolerance level. Not even god knows how many times my online has frozen on me in the middle of a loading screen into a game or while I was looking at final totals waiting to be brought back to the lobby of that game. This game is plenty fun if you have patience though, as I said. When you start out, it's like a fact of life that you're probably gunna suck nuts. But as you keep playing and playing, you'll start to get some more kills for yourself and you'll start to realize how the aiming works online and how to beat others in strafe-firefights. You can make and manage your own clan or just go around joining other people's clans, which is eh, w.e. I don't do it. You go around online and usually about 10 out of the 16 people in a room will be in a clan, so yeah, it is popluar. Aside from clans though, lot's of people use weapons of choice. i.e. You could have like 5 -10 people running around with either M14's, M16's, or M4's because they wanna. Then you can have other people either running around with weapons that they like, just running and gunning, or you can have someone sitting in a corner in some bushes with a sniper and pick off 2 or 3 guys from that position before running to another. But then again that sniper may be picked off by another sniper that he doesn't notice before he even gets anyone. It's really all about patience online. If you have patience, you can have hours upon hours of fun with it. What's there to say about graphics? They're good but they're bad. When you shoot guys, usually 1 out of maybe like 4 or 5 different animations happens when they die. No big deal though, just don't pay attention to the animation that much and you'll be fine. The blood is very good in my opinion. You snipe someone in the head from 70 meters away, you'll see them drop and you'll blood just kind of fly into the air like a mist. If you shoot someone who's down, you'll see an endless supply of blood soak the ground. If you should someone who's near a wall/rock/w.e., you'll see the blood on that surface. It's all well and good. The character and weapon models all look very good and realistic. You can even see the tracer bullets coming out of the gun if you pay attention to it. The only tiny little complaint is the whole flat shrubbery thing. When you sit shrubs or are looking into shrubs trying to find someone who's proning from a distance, it will be difficult. The shrubbery and foliage does provide excellent cover at distances, and sometimes even at short lengths. You only really see the problem if you sit in it and just look at it. Then you'll see that it's really nothing but flat models that glued together in the middle. BUT HEY!! It gets the job done, so it's fine for now. Sound. Daym. This is the first game I've ever rated in my history that I've said the sound is better than the graphics in. The sound in this game is really right on with everything. Just about every single weapon sounds different. You can be on one side of the map and here gunfire from the other side and be able to identify which gun it is. That's how differed some of the sounds are. It really is pretty cool. You can hear the characters running through the water and you can hear someone run by you through the grass or on concrete. You hear everything in this game if you listen closely enough. If you're close enough to an enemy or a friendly who's throwing a grenade, you can hear them say "Fire in the hole" or w.e. it is they say in the other lanuages. If you just happen to be unlucky enough to have a grenade explode near you, or an RPG shot near you, like to the points that you don't die, your hearing will be deafened for a few seconds into this constant ringing which eventually does fade out. The only problem with that though is that if too many grenades explode near you within a short amount of time, then sometimes the game will get messed up and your hearing will get screwed for that whole online session. What I found to probably be the coolest part of the whole deal, was that when I was a terrorist and a SEAL would stand within like 5 feet of me and say a taunt, I would not only see the taunt at the top of the screen like you would normally see, I actually heard the SEAL himself say the taunt next to me! Now I don't know just how far the limit's of what they'll say are, but still, that was pretty f***ing cool. Value. Remember the whole "hours upon hours of fun" in the online section? Yeah. So that's my review. My experience with the game was extremely good and is yet till this day extrememly good whenever I go back to it from my other newer games. If you have SOCOM I, buy this game. If you like run-and-gun shooters, buy this game. If you have online, buy this game. It's as simple as that.

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