Code of Honor 2: Conspiracy IslandPublisher:City Interactive
Platform: PC
UK Price:£16.99 (inc. Delivery)
US Price:$19.99 (inc. Delivery)

First things first – yes, I know that in the UK we spell the word ‘Honour’ with a U. I know this is a UK based site and yes, I am English. Still, out of a need for consistency and respect for the developers of this game, we’ll be using the American spelling for this article.

The creators call it Code of Honor, so we shall too - no matter how wrong they are or how inept they prove. Moving on.

Code of Honor 2 is the second game in the Code of Honor series – something that came as as much of surprise to me as it has to you – and continues to chart the adventures of a squad in the French Foreign Legion.

I’m hesitant to be any more specific than that and clarify whether you play the same character or not as I haven’t played the first game and the game doesn’t exactly make it very clear at all. In fact, it literally just dumps you in. One minute you’re watching the main menu, the next you’re on a boat racing towards a beach and having orders yelled at you.

Slowly, the game makes it possible to pick up the bare bones of the plot and you discover that you are on a small island where utterly nondescript terrorists are attempting to obtain some nuclear material so that they can hold the world to ransom. That whole thing.

Don’t go thinking that this slow reveal of the plot is a clever and deliberate attempt to engage you as a player though, because it isn’t. It’s just bad storytelling. The entire structure of the game relies very much on the assumption that you’ve read the back of the box, scoured the Internet and devoured the manual with a voraciousness that would dissuade even the most obnoxious of librarians from trying to claim late fees.

If have done all this then good for you – the utterly non-intricate details of the Global Revolutionary Front and their quest for plutonium are yours. Not that there are actually any details though as it isn’t ever made clear what the Global Front want revolutionising anyway.

To give the game credit though it does actually do a good job with some plot turns. The first time you attempt to capture the apparent leader of the terrorists for example, who is basically just a grunt retextured to look like a second-rate GMan rip-off, is handled with only minor ineptitudes.

The objective ends in a predictable defeat and renders that entire section of the game as nothing more than filler, but somehow the game presents it well despite all the problems and the mission feels more essential that it really is.

Which is probably the only good thing you can say about the plot of the game and the rest of it is firmly downhill in the most pointless, poorly (or not) told way. The narrative is generic, meandering nonsense of the worst possible tripe and the script seems to be contrived solely as way to give the level designers a chance to make you repeat the same, bland levels over and again before moving onto the next piece of low-quality indetikit gaming.

Now, about the gameplay...