Opposingly, multiplayer in Hidden & Dangerous 2 was yet another big let-down. The original game was almost legendary for its addictive co-op play, simply because it fit so well into the main campaign. With four soldiers, all the different weapons and vehicles, and heavy slant on tactical gameplay, there's no way you could go wrong by just slapping a co-op function into the game and shipping it out. So why did Illusion Softworks choose to ignore the one function that made Hidden & Dangerous so popular while developing the sequel? I don't have the slightest idea, but the fact that Hidden & Dangerous 2 ships with no co-op play is something that immediately alienated a lot of the fan base. In its place is a multiplayer function for players to fight each other over a variety of maps (based on singleplayer templates, it seems) in a number of different gameplay modes, such as Occupation (fight for control of key areas on a map), or objective-based gameplay. With the large number of weapons and occasional vehicles to use, one would expect this to still be a pretty sweet experience, but this is not the case. The interface is shoddy (one example is that there's absolutely no variation whatsoever on global and team-based chat, so it's impossible to tell whether someone is chatting to everyone, or just his team), the game isn't very stable, and the net code commonly resulted in jumpy characters that were very difficult to hit and kill. The game even had a serious problem authenticating the CD key of players returning to a server until a basic patch was released. The lack of co-op is very depressing, but the crummy PVP gameplay they put in to replace it just reeks of mediocre quality.

Graphics and sound are the two final elements I will touch on before bringing this review to a close. Hidden & Dangerous 2 is powered by the same engine used by Mafia, and manages to give off quite a nice presentation. The landscapes are very wide-open with the ability to see insane distances, the amount of detail is impressive, frame rates stayed very playable (even on the family 800mhz/GF3Ti200 machine), and there's even wacky rag-doll physics to play with for the corpses. My system, for the record, is a respectable XP2500+ with a Radeon 9600 Pro and 512MB of DDR RAM, but it should be said that the game has a number of scalable graphics options to help users lower down the charts make the game run nice. The environments are definitely convincing, and the artists behind the game should be congratulated for doing a good job. My only complaint in this department is that the animations sometimes felt a little rigid and awkward, and I encountered some occasional weird clipping bugs. The audio aspect to the game is also impressive, as the weapons don't seem dumbed-down, but in fact have some very meaty sound effects and feel very satisfying to fire. Good explosions can never be complained about, and even the environmental ambience helps for some good immersion. Each mission also has a variety of music scores that change focus based on if there's any action occurring or not. Sound and graphics-wise, Hidden & Dangerous 2 is good. Not particularly exceptional, but good enough to carry the game. A shame the rest of it doesn't seem to stand up.

I went into Hidden & Dangerous 2 with high expectations - perhaps too high. In today's age of gaming, I would've thought that developers would be aware of proper aspects of game design and how things should be done. I would've thought they had learned from their mistakes of the original game and could create a product slightly less infested with bugs. And I would've thought that co-op play would have been given more of a priority than a half-assed player-vs.-player mode - the community has certainly placed enough demand out for it. But who am I kidding? When we have companies like Gearbox publicly admitting that they didn't expect team killing to be such a problem in Halo (PC) when asked why the game shipped with inadequate grief-player safeguards, I have to ask why I bother to expect anything decent out of ambitious titles at all these days. Next thing you know, Deus Ex: Invisible War will be released in its final form and turn out to be a disappointment. And when that happens, my friends, we are truly damned.

In conclusion, Hidden & Dangerous 2 is a decent World War 2 tactical game, marred by extensive bugs, design flaws, and, yes, a lack of co-op support. Maybe when it's patched up it'll be worth your hard-earned dough, but for the time being, only die-hard fans or gamers that don't demand much out of their games will want to pick it up.