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Call of Duty 3 Review - Wii

Explosions, violence, tanks and Germans: Call of Duty 3 is all about action. Liberate Paris while you hunt down the Nazi regime, playing out the roles of four soldiers from different nations, America, Britain, Canada and Poland. With a massive arsenal of weapons including most of the guns used in World War II, you find yourself in the midst of battle after battle after battle as you work your way closer to Berlin. Add the Nintendo Wii to the equation, and you have an epic struggle on the battlefield. Master the motion sensing controls, and you’ll think you’re capable of actually going to war.

Gameplay

Call of Duty 3 is not a stealth game, nor is it an all-out FPS like Halo or Doom. It’s a duck and cover game, similar to Gears of War but without the cinematic effects. You can’t throw yourself up against walls, but by twisting the Wii Remote clockwise and anti-clockwise, you can lean out to either side, which is sort of the same as a fixed wall-cover system. In fact, the Wii Remote provides an all new system that makes war games even harder and challenging, or as some may put it, more fun. You use the motion controls to do a lot of commands where on other consoles you have to push a button, and these commands actually follow how you would do them in real life. Such as, for melee you push the remote forward.

Throughout the game, there are explosive car action scenes unlike any war game out there. You take control of a vehicle with the Wii Remote, and inevitably end up going at top speed while basically trying to avoid pillars and other firm structures. Breaking through barns and other walls while knocking over the enemies is all part of the fun in these moments of the game, and we hope to see more of them in the next game in the franchise.

What we found most difficult was the one-on-one fights. Instead of mashing a button repetitively, like on the Xbox 360, the Nintendo Wii’s motion controls require you to do rather weird motions in order to overcome the ambusher. The term “if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again” comes to mind as we learnt the ropes of those fights, and it seemed a little silly as there’s only a handful of times throughout the game where you actually have that sort of encounter.

All up, the controls seem a little too difficult to learn, with an incredibly steep learning curve right from the word go. It’s not the relaxed enjoyable war game that you may remember from the other games in the franchise, it’s a difficult struggle from the moment you’re placed in battle, and some situations prove to be almost unplayable especially when the frame-rate issues are thrown in. The interface however is (continued next page)