Addictive... Your girlfriend will hate you!

Author's Rating:

Pros: Great game, fun to play and multiplayer looks good.

Cons: No blood, sub-par unlockables.

The Bottom Line: 
This is a good game, worth buying, maybe not right away, but after the price drops for sure. I liked it, helped me kill a weekend.

Author's Review
Being a Tom Clancy fan, I'm always intrigued by these types of games.

First things first, I'll start with how the game starts; the intro is awesome. As I was watching it, my dad thought it was some sort of documentary on television. This tells you something about the caliber of the animation.

The load times are average, not exceedingly fast - but not exceedingly slow either.

In any case, the game offers two versions, single player and multiplayer. This review will focus mainly on the single player side. You can play quick missions, or campaign. The campaign (story) is much more interesting. There are about 15 levels in total, all of which are set in North Korea. The storylines are very good, and the characters are drawn out pretty good, each with their own attitudes and style of play. The missions vary from recon, lone wolf, protect, defend or even firefight. The firefight and lone wolf ones were the ones I found to be the most fun to play. There's not a better feeling than picking off a commie from 300 ft away with a sniper rifle. The missions are started off by a brief synopsis of the mission, which is kind of cool because you get an idea of how the mission is going to "go down". The 3D animations are totally cool, some with a "matrix effect".

On the topic of weapons, I'll say that the game is realistic, in the loading/reloading of guns, the switch of weapons, and the game is accurate in that lighter weapons take less time to switch to/from. And certain weapons are easier to aim than others (grenade launcher takes forever). You can play the game in either "over the shoulder" or first person mode, over the shoulder is WAY cooler. The weapons are way cool, the M29 with the gun camera being cool, it takes a minute to get used to, but it's the best weapon in the game. This is a very cool gun with a built in grenade launcher and laser guidance system for air attacks.

The controls are fairly straightforward, ONCE you get the hang of them, which for me was near the last few levels of the game, who reads the instruction manual anyways??? One of the coolest parts of this game is that you have "command" over your fellow soldiers, i.e. you tell them what to do. For instance you can tell them to hold position, or pick one to operate a stationary weapon, or tell one to destroy a vehicle. One of the things I didn't like was sometimes, if you tell one person to do one thing, the whole squad does that which can kill your mission. I guess this adds to the realism of the game (sometimes you end up working with fools).

The AI is good, not great but good, I'd say it is a step up from Halo 2. Enemies will sometimes flank you from around the side if you wait too long or they will strategize and form a front/behind attack. One thing about enemies is there's no blood and the bodies tend to disappear if you turn your head. That kind of sucks, (the no blood thing).

One of the best features of the game, you can save at any point. Very cool indeed. After you complete a mission, you can unlock special features, kind of bland, just pictures of people and things. I thought maybe it would be like testing grounds or I dunno, something cooler than just a picture of an AK47, or a digital photograph of Thierry Dubois.

The multiplayer portion of the game is fun, I didn't have much chance to play it and I didn't play it on Xbox live, but locally it's fun. I'd say it's on par with Halo 2, maybe a bit more fun since it's more realistic. No vehicles though.

The sound is great in the game, realistic but sometimes I found that after a certain character had died, his voice was still heard over the radio? That was kinda weird. A couple of the characters are annoying (Alicia Diaz who kept dying, and Jennifer Burke who kept announcing it!).