Amazon.com: Call of Duty 2: Xbox 360: Video Games

161 Reviews

5 star:		(101)
4 star:		(40)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

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4.4 out of 5 stars (161 customer reviews)

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50 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great War Game Classic, November 26, 2005

By	Lisa Shea "LisaShea.com" - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars

Call of Duty 2 takes you into the trenches of World War II, starting with the frozen tundra of Russia under attack. High realism levels really draw you into the combat.

You start out as a raw Russian recruit, in the freezing winter of Moscow, trying to learn how to use a rifle and stave off the impending Nazi take-over. You only get a few moments of training before you're sent out into combat to defend your home town.

The graphics are a really nice mix of realistic scenery and helpful gameplay. Items you need will glow gold so that they're easy to find. A compass on your display will point your way to important objectives. Your ammo, health and other indicators are easy to find.

But in the meantime, your main screen graphics are really quite impressive. From the brickwork on the buildings to the smoke-grenade haze, from the uniforms on your friends and enemies, the quality on a HD TV is quite impressive. The widescreen view lets you keep an eye all around you while you move your way through hostile territory. You try to focus while you hear the screams, calls, bullet blasts and grenade booms landing all around you. It's like being in a warzone, which of course it is.

Your teammates are all around you, and they do their best to help you out. Like you, many of them are raw recruits and not very good at things. As you move forward, they get more skilled, as do you. You learn how to pause before aiming, how to use cover and to approach your objective with stealth.

I do wish that you could have more than 8 simultaneous players online during XBox Live. The single player games are great, but of course they don't last forever. When you get through them, the next step is to start playing online to face a "real challenge" with live players. The game would be SUPERB if it let you play large squad on large squad. Maybe that could come with future upgrades. Still, at least playing with 8 people lets you keep enjoying the graphics, the gameplay and the skill set. It's always far more challenging to play against live players rather than playing against a computer set. Computers are great for training, but live players are where the long term enjoyment of a game shines through.

Highly recommended for war game lovers, especially those who enjoy squad-type combat. If you hook up with a team of like-minded online players, this could provide for countless months of online fun, as you face your squad against other highly skilled teams.

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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid, Fun, and Challenging., November 28, 2005

By	jinglehimerschmidt (CO, USA) - See all my reviews

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

After playing the PC version of the first call of duty, and the expansion pack, I didn't quite know what to expect from the xbox 360 version. On the PC the game is smooth, precise, exciting, and overall a great deal of fun.

This game does not disappoint on the xbox 360. The battles are unbelievable. They are epic, fierce, and make you really feel like you're there at times. The pace is fairly adjustable since you can play to your play style for the most part. On most difficulty levels you can run and gun or sit back and play the sniper or let your boys do some of the work, etc. The easiest difficulty level is really, really easy. However, the veteran difficulty is really, really hard (but not unplayable, it's actually very fun because of the realism).

The online component is equally enjoyable. You can play with up to eight players in a few different kinds of matches. The levels are great (some are from older versions), and the competition online is good. I do notice major lag issues in about 25% of the games I play. When it does lag it's basically unplayable. However, I just jump out of that game, into another room and it's fine. Without lag, it's probably the best online game I've ever played.

They definitely need to do some work on the online ranking system (it doesn't work at all) and the online "lobby" (there isn't one). But the actual gameplay online is crisp and exciting.

I purchased most of the launch titles for the Xbox 360. This one is definitely my favorite so far. Some of the other games are solid, but this one is the most fun both online and off.

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26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fun, Fast, Flawed, December 31, 2005

By	Terry Mesnard (Bellevue, NE) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars

EDIT: Below I make comments about the multiplayer and it is the multiplayer that has reduced my score from 5 to 4 stars. According to IGN, the developers are working on a patch that will, at least, fix the lag. Chances are it will change the way you find groups *crosses fingers*. I will continue to update this to reflect the latest news.

There are a couple of FPSs to think about during Xbox 360's launch. Call of Duty 2 is probably the more exciting and thrilling of these launch titles, boasting beautiful graphics, fast game play and silky smooth controls. If you have HD, it is even better. I never truly understood the difference in picture quality until I saw the game running side by side on a HD and a regular TV and it is remarkable.

The game is broken down into two categories, the single player and the multiplayer. The single player game is intense. It drops you in the middle of three campaigns and things heat up from there. It feels like you are in the middle of a war-torn battlefield. The immersion is great. Your teammates are actually decent, the enemies will pick up and throw back grenades at you that you have already thrown. Sometimes the enemy AI is pretty stupid but overall it is really well implemented. Every mission feels like war is being thrown in your face. Its do or die and the bullets are whizzing by. Its incredibly intense and exciting. Every mission should have you trying to catch your breath by the end.

The sound is amazing, particularly on a surround sound equipped TV. In the single player and in the multiplayer it is incredibly useful. For example, if you are playing multiplayer and hear footsteps behind you but your radar doesn't indicate any friendlies near you, you might want to turn around. This has saved my life countless times. That is, unless the enemy is crouch-walking and silent, which is another story...

The part of the game that is so important right now is the online portion. And unfortunately, this is where the "flawed" part of my title comes into play. Multiplayer is a lot of fun. The games are quick moving, finding a room is (with exception explained below) simple and usually quick. Getting into the action is great. There is a huge assortment of levels and a lot of different gametypes from death match (and team DM), search and destroy, HQs, etc etc. You will find something fun here level-wise and setting wise. Using the weapons again is smooth and control is great.

The gameplay tends to run slow than Halo 2 (for those who played Halo 2). I happen to like this type of gameplay. Instead of just running around aimlessly shooting your guns until your ammo is depleted, you have to think. Its more realistic. The shades of your costumes usually match the setting and so you have to have your wits about you. The war-torn cities are amazing and produce some agonizingly intense matchs where you never know where that sniper is until he shoots (the radar only picks up enemies that shoot). Its slower paced but I absolutely love it and would have it no other way.

Its too bad that some design flaws keep this game from being a perfect 5 stars. The biggest flaw is that they didn't take a page from Halo 2. Halo 2 has probably the very best console way of finding people, playing with your friends and keeping in contact. Call of Duty 2 has none of this. If you have friends that want to play with you, you can't start a party and keep them together. What ends up happening is, one person will have to find a game and everyone else will have to go into their dashboard on the person's name and click "join game in session" and hope that they get in before the game finds its 8 people.

When the mission is over, you have to do this again. After completing a match, the game kicks you back to the pre-lobby screen where you go to find another match. You can't stick together with your friends nor with people you just played with. Why did they do this? I can't fathom any reason for this other than they didn't have enough time to successfully implement it. It is irritating trying to get your friends to play with you when the system isn't built around it.

Another glaring flaw is the server stability. I can't count how many times someone has joined the game and the server lags. Lags to the point that when your character moves, it makes you feel like you're drunk, stumbling around everywhere. Also, sometimes joining a game is a pain because of the "server full" notices or other error messages that pop up. Sometimes it takes 3 or 4 or so tries to actually get into the pre-game lobby.

Another problem is that when you get into the game you are able to decide which team or let the computer auto-assign. This is great in theory; unfortunately, what ends up happening is you have a team of 5 against a team of 3 or worse. Then people can switch over teams at will which can cause confusion and can make some of the games underbalanced.

A final problem is part server problems part user problems. A lot of times you start out with a full match of 8 people, but by the end of the match you are down to 2 vrs 2. Or 1 vrs 2. People either disconnect due to the server or just plain leave. And it is very annoying to those of us who are trying to just have fun when all of a sudden 3/4 of your team is gone but the other side still has a full team.

I have been pretty harsh on the multiplayer but I stand by it. It has the potential to be the best mutliplayer experience on the 360 for a long time coming (particularly with the very believable possibility that Halo 3 won't be launching until the Halo movie comes out in 2007) but the design flaws and server stability issues really hurt it. The actual game design helps keep this game a solid 4 star game; its definitely above average. I just wish they could fix the other problems that would help this game soar. Right now, I have to recommend purchasing this game. Just keep in mind there are problems that can and probably will annoy you.