Call of Duty 3
© Activision

Mania Grade: B+
Platform: X-Box 360 (Also on Wii, PS2, PS3, PC, and X-Box)
ESRB: T
Genre: First Person Shooter
Players: 1-24
Online: Yes
Developer: Treyarch
Publisher: Activision
Suggested Retail: $59.99
Graphics: A-
Sound: B+
Gameplay: B+
Replay: B
Fun Factor: B

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"Call of Duty 3"

If you ever wanted to enjoy going to war but did not have the courage to join the military, well Call of Duty 3 will be the game for you. Of course there have been plenty of other World War 2 games out and about, whether they be RTS, TPS or FPS. A lot of them have endearing features, where they are true to history, or others have just provided a lighter experience. Call of Duty 3 provides an in the trenches approach to the game, much like they have done in the past. It continues the war story by generally using Mr. Nickels as your main character. With him you are dropped by your bootstraps into a conflict with minimal training, and just like many untrained soldiers you end up being shot a lot.  

It is okay to get shot a lot though, and that is where the Call of Duty 3 twist of the game lies, where you character can take massive abuse, yet still keep on going. It is an interesting approach, where you can take 4-5 bullets and keep on going after you gather some cover and allow your body to rejuvenate Wolverine style. If you continue to be a damage sponge, by not going for cover, you will end up looking a bit like swish cheese. Using this style of battle to your advantage though will allow you to hop into danger at the drop of the hat, allowing you to constantly stay in the heat of battle. The features ends up a little like having shields from Halo, but it works well enough to keep the gameplay flowing nicely. 

Graphically the game looks fantastic. I loved walking around and checking out the sites, the rubble, and the ongoing conflict around me. Right in the beginning of the game you will see plenty of enemies fighting allies, with about 30 people on the screen and buildings in the background. Other graphical affects involved explosions, which were quite nice to look at. A fairly good feature is that the environment is semi destructible, but I would have preferred them all to be fully destroyable. Perhaps my favourite part involved the black smoke that would waft up after a grenade was used. There is plenty to see over the many levels, and while the faces of the characters were fairly well done, they still seemed to lack that special something. The game also lacked collision detection of dying characters, so you would have several dead bodies lying in a pile, and phasing through one another. This was quite disappointing to see considering what they were able to accomplish. 

The shooting aspect of the game works quite well, so long as you constantly go into the aim mode by using the left shoulder trigger. Without it, even at mid range, you will often miss your shots. At close range though you are free to let your weapons rip, and after around 3 shots most of your enemies will die. Later in the game you will often find yourself fighting through buildings, so it is important to know when to take your time and aim, verses running in and shooting wildly. Houses often have multiple Jerry’s (Germans) around every corner, so the question often is if you should stick to the corners and progress slowly by picking them off one at a time, or go all in. 

There are further deterrents to going “all in” immediately, since your opponents can throw grenades at you. Likewise you can also throw your grenades back, or if you are quick enough, throw the enemies’ grenades back at them instead. For me this was a welcomed feature, but there often was not enough time to get to them and throw them back before they exploded. When throwing your own grenades you could stall before throwing them, allowing the timer to tick down in your hands. Indeed this could be a dangerous tactic, but it can work out much better than throwing them in directly. Generally if you just throw your grenades in, without prepping them, enemies will run away from them.  

The other option is using smoke grenades, which cloud of the field quite nicely. I personally loved the smoke affects, since they affectively covered up the view of the battlefield, though looked quite real. This would reduce your enemies’ accuracy for quite some time, so they can be quite useful. They were a little slow to activate, so it was often difficult to use them efficiently. Overall I had a love / hate relationship with the grenades, but overall they worked quite nicely. 

Other features of the game include picking up your enemy’s weapons and using them against their makers. You will quite often need to do this, since the ammunition of your own weapons will run out. I found it fairly odd myself, since there were plenty of dying allies on my team, but I was not able to salvage their ammunition. This will keep you balancing between which weapons are best for the situation, but I would have preferred to have a more proprietary approach to refilling your supplies. You only had the option of holding onto two different weapons, so one was generally used for long distances, and the other for short. 

There are several mini-game-esc features that keep you occupied. When jumping in through a few windows, or going through doorways, occasionally you will run into a enemy that grabs your gun. When they do this, you struggle against them for control of it by hitting both of the trigger buttons. If you win, you defeat them by hitting them with the weapon. It worked fairly well, but these were scripted events that had to happen, rather then happening randomly.  When setting a bomb, you will need to follow the button sequence that the system lays out. Finally when you hop into a boat, you will need to manually paddle your way across by stroking the right trigger. There were a few others, and some of them were somewhat fun the first time, but when I did them again later I was fairly bored by them. 

In the end, this will be the war simulation game to pick up this winter. It does a great job at keeping in the action, while keeping a good atmosphere of the Second World War. The general sound in the game was quite nice, and occasionally the soft tunes of the time would be playing in the background of every bullet that whizzed through the air. There was plenty of action on the screen, and the game was hardly ever bogged down by it. I had plenty of fun with it, even though the difficulty went up and down randomly. My only major complaint is that there were plenty of invisible walls, and so climbing over fences to get to the action was impossible. All and all, Captain Gordon gives Call of Duty 3 a B+. 

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? CaptainGordonEdward@Gmail.com