Code of Honor 2: Conspiracy Island review

It’s short, it’s bland, and it’s got all the ingredients to be PC Gamer’s most generic shooter of ’08. Vaguely foreign-sounding enemies! A helicopter boss fight! Boring caves and industrial environments! Unsynchronized dialogue animations that make hardened soldiers seem like pixelated sock puppets! You’re a French Foreign Legion commando who speaks in grizzly army English, deployed with your comrades to foil the plutonium-stealing plot of tropical terrorists. How do we know they’re terrorists? They wear berets, they like nukes, and they’ve trained for years in desert camps to stand still and absorb your headshots.

They’re also apparently an army of clones. You’ll be shootin’ the same four character models through the entirety of the game’s jagged, dated level design: a wash of muddy textures and blocky geometry. The enemies themselves aren’t the main offender - decent ragdoll makes hopping through rooms and spraying buckshot mildly fun; foes occasionally flee or use cover if they live long enough. This gunplay may have been passable in 1999, but without compelling features, flashy effects, any metagaming, unlockables, or storytelling spice, nothing stands out.

Like bolting square tires to your sedan, the result is technically functional, but incredibly clunky. The team-based and free-for-all multiplayer modes aren’t worth your time, but beyond the single-player’s moving subtlety (spotting an enemy high on a cliff, the protagonist utters: “This might be a good time to put a sniper scope on my FAMAS...”), I have to declare false advertising: there’s not a hint of anything to imply a “conspiracy” on this isle, unless the Illumnati, the Girl Scouts, and David Duchovny were all somehow involved in allowing Code of Honor a second release.

PC Gamer scores games on a percentage scale, which is rounded to the closest whole number to determine the GamesRadar score.

PCG Final Verdict: 36% (don’t bother)

Sep 30, 2008