In amidst all the extra-long book reading and multiple movies-watching I’ve been up to lately, I managed to squeeze in time to finish the first of my three launch titles for the XBox 360. (Yay, I found one!) Call of Duty 2 tells yet another version of that same half-decade story of tragedies and triumph that is World War II. And really, this is the beauty of the WWII video games; there are an infinite number of stories to tell, so everyone can cash in as early and often as they’d like, so long as the story and the game are good.

In this case: success. I mean, it’s easy to care about beating Nazis, but they do a good job of making you care about the soldiers around you as well, which I haven’t seen very often yet. You might call it a mistake to get the AI unintelligent enough to run in front of another soldier lining up a shot, but I call that realistic. These were kids, after all, and probably they took more than their own fair share of actual friendly fire. But I appear to digress. Anyway, you’ve got a standard sequence of Russians, British, and Americans fighting it out against the German war machine, mostly in Europe, and let us never forget a fateful D-Day landing thrown in for deadly measure.

Really, deadliness was the one problem with the game. It was far, far too easy to survive on the normal setting. That’s okay, as it has replayability in spades, and I actually expect to for a change, at least once. The worst part was the multiplayer. … … Okay, now that you’ve settled down, let me explain. I haven’t gotten onto Live and found a big battle to jump into with a couple of friends. But I had a friend around to do one on one in the console, and… man, it stank. It’s possible that the options let it tweak down to usable levels, but all we had was a series of one-kill, reset to beginning of level, and on a level that was a little large for two people and without any ammo to collect to change up the flow. Very boring. So, I’ll reserve judgment there, and really hope that the online play and some tweaks make it as fun as I’d expect it to be, instead of as miserable as it was.

And did I mention how very, very pretty it is?