Graphics: Imagine for a moment that you’re at a nightclub dancing with what appears to be a beautiful woman. Flashing light plays off her face, revealing ambiguous details that suggest attractiveness. Last call comes and the house lights increase, and instead of a hot babe you see a bent old crone holding your hand and begging for your phone number. COH2 re-creates this nightmare in the same fashion, using lights to cover up some poor graphical work. The character models are cumbersome and repetitive, outdoor textures are stretched and pixilated, and although the indoor areas fare better, they are still just a step above ugly. If you happen to have a fondness for late-1990s visuals, however, this might just blow your mind.

Interface: When the pause menu ritualistically freezes a game, you know you’re in for a fun ride. Aside from this debilitating bug, the rest of the menus and the HUD function correctly, are minimalistic and keep tabs on ammo and objectives. Health works much like other recent shooters; once you’ve taken a certain amount of damage, your vision blurs, notifying you of impending doom and the need for reliable cover. I still wish I could pause the darn thing, though.

Gameplay: The single-player campaign barely takes two hours to complete, which is fine if you think that COH2 is worth $10 an hour to play. These are two hours that could have been better spent darning socks or peeling grapes. Controls are serviceable (thankfully), but I got hung up at almost every turn on uneven terrain and surprisingly sticky walls. The final boss battle (there are only two and they both involve helicopters) was, for lack of a more descriptive word, lame, and lasted all of 10 seconds, during which I only fired one shot.

Multiplayer: My search for a populated server was turning out to be a fruitless endeavor until I decided to host a game to at least check out the levels and see what kind of options there were. To my surprise, no sooner had I fired up a round of deathmatch than two lonely souls trickled in to help me put the game through its multiplayer paces. What was there was functional and smooth, but ultimately flawed because of poorly placed spawn points and unevenly balanced starting weaponry. The FAMAS beats out any other armament to the point of embarrassment, leaving those who selected anything else at the round’s outset to scramble for a dropped weapon. COH2 offers a tiny selection of three maps, three modes of play (deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag) and little else to keep you playing much beyond a couple of rounds.

Sound FX: My most obvious concern is about the American actors not attempting accents while voicing French soldiers. Immersion is ruined, but if I didn’t know what nationality the characters were, I’d say that the actors did a good job with their lines. Enemy soldiers have accents, oddly enough, but the mix makes it sound like they’re talking into your ear when they could be 100 feet away. This caught me off guard on more than one occasion, causing me to send random bullet sprays at unsuspecting shadows on the wall, but the guns sound like guns, and the PAMAS pistol has a nice beefy kick to it.

Music: Code of Honor 2’s soundtrack is synthesized, orchestral pomp that doesn’t raise or lower the tension in any significant way. There’s really nothing here that you haven’t heard done better in a war game before.

Intelligence: AI enemies in COH2 follow a pattern no matter what your character does to provoke them. There is no way to sneak up on unsuspecting terrorists, as they spring to action no matter what route you take into a room. Once alerted, the progression goes: fire, relocate, relocate, cover, fire, and when all else fails, charge the player and get stabby with him. This was my experience with Mendoza’s men almost every time, but I had to laugh at one point when I shot a guy from an extreme distance and sent him falling into a chasm. His buddy asked his literally fallen comrade “How ya doing?” before turning his attentions to me. Entertaining, but not necessarily appropriate for a “serious” story such as this. This brain-cell deficit is shared by your squadmates. Many times I found myself suddenly shooting at the back of a legionnaire’s head instead of my target because their scripted paths put them in my line of fire, and they offer no effective support. They can’t die, either, so don’t worry about losing anybody who wasn’t already going to bite it.

Difficulty: Each area on Conspiracy Island is populated with a set number of enemies who are easily taken out no matter what the difficulty. Health regenerates rather quickly, so saving yourself from death is just a matter of heading back to a cleared area until you’re healed. Don’t worry about being chased, because the bad guys don’t do it. Just heal up and return to finish the job.

Overall: Code of Honor: Conspiracy Island is yet another in a line of bad games that have mysteriously come my way from the same developer/publisher. There were honest attempts to make a shooter here, and while some of the graphical touches try to mimic the big guns of PC gaming, FPS fans are smarter than this. Spend $10 more and get something like Crysis: Warhead. I’m sure you’ll thank yourself in the end.