A game that really shows a great balance of fun and realism, yet only truly reaches these great heights online.
User Rating: 9.4 | SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALs PS2
SOCOM II is without a doubt the best multiplayer experience outside of Unreal Tournament 2004 and Counter-Strike. And I am saying this not as somebody who got the game right when it came out, but someone who has bought the game two years late and has had plenty of experience with online gaming. But while the mulit-player aspect is truly great, the real bummer is that the single player campaign is so boring and is just plain not fun to play. The graphics in SOCOM actually aren't half bad considering the game came out two years ago. The character models and animations are really good, and the environments completely capture the realism of the war you are fighting every time you respawn. The game does take a hit in maps that are large (which are many) with a good amount of fog, but that really didn't bother me much considering I could always see the enemies that were a threat within the fog. Probably the best aspect of the presentation is the sound design. The weapons also sound realistic, and the musical score is truly something of brilliance. It all captures this feel that, while the action is limited to 16 players, it feels like a full scale war going on in every game. The character voices are good with all of the different languages well done, but some of the voice-actors sound a little weird. But this is only in the single player mode, which should only really be touched upon to hone in on basic skills. Let me just get this out of the way, this is the most intense online game you will play. Every step I take feels like the wrong one, as somebody could jus pop out from the corner and gun me down. I remember initiating a firefight with another player in an alleyway. I gunned him down with my M14 and ran for cover. As I was running a grenade went off somewhere near me and knocked my character over. I had also lost my hearing for a slight time as the grenade deafened me for a time. I felt my control rumble as gunfire hit my back and I lunged for more cover. I popped up just in time to see two more nades go off and blow my opposition away. Just catching my breath I was shot in the back of the head. That was round of many where I lost track of life around me and became completely transfixed with the surrounding environment. Just don't expect that in the single-player. Unlike multi-player, single player has you carefully sneaking through overgrowth while telling orders to your teammates who are perfect marksmen, but are also quite stupid. The slow pace gets tiring, especially when you go through a level for an hour, only to get shot by a sniper you can't see through the fog, or forget to do an objective that wasn't clearly enough given to you. Then you must restart the entire mission. Not my kind of fun. Still if you have a Network Adapter and want a great game for it, this is the one you have been looking forward to. 
