Finished the Xbox 360 CoD2 Single Player Campaign...

I finished the campaign on the "easy" difficulty setting, since that's how I originally started the campaign. I was surprised at the difficulty of some portions of the game. The AI isn't all that smart on "pussy mode" as Matt likes to call it. The Nazis will stand there & let you shoot them, taking seconds between shots at you. (The friendly AI has some issues, too. I had to replay an entire level because I broke some checkpoint & Captain Price never followed me into a Nazi-infested building. The final objective of the level was "Meet Captain Price in the kitchen." but the silly sod was still outside.) I can see where ratcheting the difficulty up would make CoD2 impossible for a barely average player like me. There are sections of the games where bullets and grenades are flying in from all directions from enemies who sometimes are annoyingly accurate.

Part of it's my fault. I never fine-tuned my keyboard/adapter rig for CoD2. The aimed shots are really difficult because the weapon sights dance around all over the place. I'm not playing multiplayer CoD2, so I wasn't that torqued out about getting it just right. That being said, there were still some issues for me with CoD2.

The Thompson magazine capacity in the game is only 20 rounds. Reloads on all the weapons are slow, so taking on multiple enemies is a pain in the ass with the Thompson. Almost all the sniper, bolt action, & semi-auto weapons were near useless because of the dancing sights. The scoped Springfield was a happy exception. Using the respiratory pause button, the Springfield was a corker. The M1 Carbine was pretty steady, but the 15 round mag & the lack of stopping power crippled it. The automatic weapons were near useless in aimed fire, too. The BAR was awesome to look at, and I'm a huge fan, but it has a 20 round mag, like the Thompson, and you can't carry a lot of ammo. The STG-44 was pretty good, but it seemed to me that it did less damage up close than the MP40, so there wasn't much reason to use it other than the sweet weapon skin. In the Russian campaigns. The PPsh-41 was pretty damn good. The high ROF was withering on those pesky Nazis, and the drum magazine has about a zillion rounds.

Overall, the best overall weapon for me was the MP40 submachinegun. I usually picked one up whenever possible due to the plentiful ammunition and the 30 round mag. It was really effective at close range, and aimed fire, due to the 30 round mag, wasn't impossible. By liberally spraying distant targets, I managed to take out some MG-42 positions with the MP40...

The best strategy for me was "Throw smoke & flank".  I moved under the cover of the smoke to a flanking position & mowed the Nazis down, firing from the hip. This is especially the case because of the Call of Duty patented "Hey, I already killed you... Why are you getting up to shoot me!" trick. You see an enemy fall down, you turn away, and 2 seconds later he's putting bullets in your ass.

CoD2, like all the rest of the CoD series, has moments, even on "easy", that I felt were a pain in the ass. A few times, objectives were unclear, leaving me confused and riddled with bullets. The compass-map thingie that all the CoD series games use sucks. Period. And the tank level? "Enemy at 12 o'clock!" No, there isn't. The enemy is over the next ridge/rise/hill and is totally invisible to the player. And, yet, the invisible enemy tank manages to put shells into my tank, magically... Don't get me wrong. The CoD games are all great. They're worth playing. But the WTF moments in the games make me less inclined to turn it up a notch & to ever face the Olympic grenade tossing team on the Normal, Hardened, or Veteran difficulty settings.