Call Of Duty: 3

At the beginning of the year, I made a list of games that I needed to finish. One of these was Call of Duty 3 for the Wii. Well, today I finished it, and I must say that I’m very pleased with the final result.

Let me go ahead and get this out of the way: if you’re a over-zealous, graphics loving faggot, you’ll probably think that this game looks pretty bad. In my own opinion, I think the visuals are just fine for the system it’s on. It’s no Gears of War, and never will be in that department, but I never thought that the game was lacking because of it. It looks fine. The only complaint about the game is that it’s visually dark; a little too dark to see anything sometimes. There’s no way to adjust the brightness in the game, so I had to settle for adjusting it on my TV, which I hate to do. However, once I got all of that squared away, I never had any problems with it.

The story of the game is your basic WWII plot: You shoot Germans. You shoot some more Germans. You shoot a Panzer…then more Germans. Where the Wii really shines is that shooting these Germans is very much more visceral than it would be on other consoles. You miss a headshot? Well that’s because your hand flinched, not because you suck at control sticks. Alternately: you get a headshot? Well that’s because your resolve will not be shattered by the never ending onslaught of Jerry, not because you’re good with control sticks. The sense of accomplishment, because of this newer control scheme, is great. No longer can you just move your control stick so that it’s head high and strafe down the road rocking every enemy you see. Now you have to make sure you’re steady amongst the chaos, and that’s definitely easier said than done.

Since the Wii allows for new control types, Call of Duty 3 brings in some interesting side controls that are generally all on the fly. What I mean by this is that you can be jumping into a fox hole ready to go to town on a couple of Germans, for example, when from behind one of them grabs your gun. I little icon comes on the screen showing you what movements you yourself have to do to get out of the situation. In this example, you have to move your arms back and forth in front of you as if you were actually fighting for your gun. Other examples include placing detonators in explosives by using your left hand to screw them in and then yanking it back to pull the pin, or holding your hands as if they were on a steering wheel to drive a jeep. There are multiple occasions when an icon like this will pop up and you have a limited amount of time to deal with the situation. All in all, the movements like this work pretty well, but sometimes they don’t take the first time you do them. Pulling the pin on those explosives, for example, sometimes took multiple repetitons of the movement before the game picked up on it. Some refinements to the system would be nice if they make another one, which they probably will.

I’m pretty pleased with this game. Once I got to be a head-shotting, awesome dude (read: became steady with the aiming system), I loved running around and playing the game. It could use a couple of gesture tweaks, but they don’t distract from the game enough for me to dwell on it.