Argh! What looked like a double knockout from Activision turns out to be a backhanded conversion follow-up to one of the best console games the Xbox has seen. Perhaps Return to Castle Wolfenstein has ruined me.

You play John Mullins, a military specialist who works for 'The Shop'. It's your (well, his) job to take out the bad guys with any means necessary in several distinct locations around the globe. You'll have everything such as Socoms, M4s with Grenade launchers, Sniper Rifles, and various small arm pieces. 10 Levels of hostage rescuing, intelligence gathering, and all out firefights are waiting to be executed.

Now, while that may have gotten your testosterone jumping, be prepared for some rather big disappointment. What was once a fun PC game has become a sad and plodding retread on the Xbox. We'll begin with the overall basic problems.

It isn't Wolfenstein.

The big hype about SoFII is that there is an insane amount of blood and guts flying around. Well, that's true. You can gut a guy senseless with your knife and actually see the knife marks, as well as blow their head clean off with the shotgun a la Resident Evil. Problems arise though when soldiers start acting like zombies and blind Supermen. For example, the game's Hit Detection, while pretty damn accurate to a degree, has some issues when it comes to near misses. There will be times when you could have sworn you hit the guy, yet he doesn't fall, but other times you're pretty sure you missed him and yet he'll die on sight. Strange but true; stranger is the response time that some enemies have. It may take them several seconds to just even look your way after your initial barrage, and even then they may not turn the right direction.

From a graphical standpoint, SoFII both succeeds and fails horribly. The characters themselves have a great amount of detail, but no facial animations. When you do get to blow them up, the amount of destruction you can wreak on their bodies is quite impressive. Slash marks, bullet holes, blown off limbs and heads, the list goes on. However, the levels you're running around leave a LOT to be desired. The Story Mode sections are in effect huge labyrinths with one good guy that you need to find before finding some lost key that is needed to open a door 20 minutes back. There are no maps and no compasses, so memorization plays a big part in your strategy. This would have been a lot easier to do if the level areas didn't look like every other area with the same stage.

When playing multiplayer, the stages are way too big for the casual gamers. Even the smallest stages seemed too elaborate and spacious with 3 or 4 characters. Unless you're absolutely sure you're going to have a huge online gathering, there is no use in connecting. Speaking of that, there's a huge glitch intentionally left in by the programmer's that Xbox Live Junkies are going to be furious over. Here are the basics: When you go on line and go to 'search' for a match with no criteria, it will say there are no matches available. If you set an option (for example, 'Deathmatch Mode') the game will then kick into search mode, but in the order the requests are sent. Meaning if you just pressed Search, and 4,000 other hit it before you, that means you have to wait till those 4,000 other people's Optimatch searches are done before you get your data bounce back. When questioned on the bizarre choice Activision had this to say:

"As stated in a prior communication, we have looked into the issue and found that some people's wait is greater than others. The wait feature is seen as necessary to ensure a fast, non-laggy, in-game experience. It was implemented so that servers would not by flooded with client requests as Xboxes across the country tried to populate their Optimatch Lists. The requests are staggered to ensure this inundation does not occur." - Activision Customer Support Representative