Call of Duty 2 (Xbox 360)

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The tank sections aren't great, but still provide some entertainment

While the Xbox 360's controller is excellent, it can't offer the same control as a mouse, so the developers have wisely included a console friendly aiming assist. When you aim down your gun's sight you'll auto-target an enemy if he's vaguely within your line of sight. This can be disabled for the 'hardcore', but seeing as it doesn't lock-on to an enemy - it simply aims where the enemy was when you looked down your sight - any movement made by the target won't be tracked. It's a help, but it doesn't remove all challenge from the game. The only real thing that's missing is leaning. In the PC game you could lean left or right to sneakily pick off an enemy, while maintaining some cover. It's noticeable in its absence, but the auto-targeting does counter this problem.

This wouldn't be half the experience if it weren't for the game's peerless audio. A great score and booming sound effects are pretty much a given, and the game doesn't disappoint in this area, but it's the constant chatter from your comrades that brings the endless battles to life. At times it's scarily realistic, with shouts of "More tanks coming in from the North," "Jerries, in the building on the left," and "Watch out, Potato Masher." It's brilliant, and while certain phrases are repeated, it never feels repetitive; it just sinks you further into the experience

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The big difference between the 360 version and the already released PC game is the frame rate. The Xbox 360 game looks indistinguishable from the game running on a high-end PC in terms of image quality (although you could crank up the AA and AF in the PC game), but it runs at an incredibly smooth frame rate. This is something that even monster PC gaming rigs struggled to achieve, and whether it's down to poor PC optimisation or pure 360 horsepower is irrelevant; it's damn impressive all the same. It's not 60 fps smooth at all times, but whereas the game on a modern PC would become unplayable at times, this is never the case on the 360 version.

The single-player game is pretty short (although this is becoming the norm these days). All three campaigns combined take little over ten hours to complete, but if played on the highest difficulty setting this number could be doubled. There's also no real story to get involved in. The game is more about throwing you into certain situations and then throwing you straight into another. There's never a dull moment, but you don't really feel any connection to any of the characters either.

On the multiplayer side of things there's the standard deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag game modes, plus the search and destroy mode that was in the original Call of Duty on PC. In this mode one team must attempt to blow up a certain object or location, while the other team tries to defend it. The only other mode is 'Headquarters' which is essentially a fight for possession of the map. Teams battle it out to set up headquarters in set areas of the map and must maintain their position to score points. The defending team's members can't respawn, so the attackers always have a good chance of overrunning the headquarters and gaining possession themselves. It's a neat mode, and certainly offers something that might gain a fairly large fan following. All these modes support up to eight players, not nearly as many as the PC version, but it's enough for plenty of enjoyable matches. The actual online implementation could be better though. After Halo 2 on Xbox Live, the lobby system here feels a little out of date.

Offline players can partake in some impressive 4-player split-screen action

New to the Xbox 360 version is four-player split-screen play. Here you'll be able to play the same game modes as you can online, and while the smaller numbers don't make for the best team-based games, plain old deathmatch is still fun. The game maintains a pretty steady frame rate too, even with action on all four windows. The smaller view of the action does make long distance shooting harder, but four players gathered around a big TV will have a great time.

Call of Duty 2 is a thoroughly entertaining and immersive experience from start to finish that hardly ever skips a beat. Vehicle sections could have been left on the design room floor, and the multiplayer mode doesn't have the lasting appeal of Perfect Dark Zero, but these are minor quibbles. If you've got an Xbox 360 you'd be a fool to miss out on such an involving first-person shooter.

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