Call of Duty 2 (360) – Replay Impressions

So I’m going for what I think are easy Xbox Live achievement points in that completing Call Of Duty 2’s missions on the hardest, Veteran mode, should be relatively easy (60 points for each mission plus an overall bonus).

That was a huge mistake at least in that thought process.

I realize that for the computer AI to get a leg up over you, the player, it needs to cheat a bit, but I swear, just getting through the entire Russian campaign took a heck of a long time simply because there were so many points where you’d be shot immediately after poking your head around the corner because the game cheated badly with soldiers knowing exactly where you are as if I were playing a wall-hacked CounterStrike game.  Again, I have to say it is a matter of making it fair to the computer since once you’ve died, you now know where to expect the enemy and thus makes it easier to defeat them, but there’s also something to be said about the near-perfect aiming with machine guns at long range that makes me wonder how many tricks the AI is pulling here.

I’m similarly working through the harder levels on Gears of War, but it’s interesting how learning to use cover in Gears is helping me alot to think about some strategies on the more open points for COD2.

And it’s actually surprising that this game looks, well, poor, given what’s come out since, but more that it feels much more like a direct PC port or a game where the graphics engine was standardized among all consoles and PC and not given any spit and polish for the 360.