Call of Duty 3
Activision
Xbox 360
While the first-person shooter (FPS) genre has experienced a
glut of war games in recent years, particularly those based on
World War II, there’s no reason this should stop if games
such as “Call of Duty 3″ are the result. With
“Call of Duty 3,” Activision and developer Treyarch
improve upon last year’s already excellent “Call of
Duty 2″ by tweaking various aspects to produce a game that
will fight for position in your Xbox’s disc tray.
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“Call of Duty 3″ follows the period of World War II
after the Allied invasion of Normandy and focuses on the battle for
France. This was a pivotal period in the Allied campaign, and we
sometimes forget that Germany didn’t just simply lie down
after D-Day.
Treyarch has nailed the monstrous scale of World War II. The
game’s graphics are eye-popping, inching ever closer to
photo-realism, and the sound succeeds in being immersive to the
point that you will think bullets are whizzing by your head.
This also isn’t “Halo,” where you can
annihilate everything in your path by yourself. Instead, players
will feel like a small part of a large war machine as they peer
through binoculars and order tanks to fire, call in air strikes and
toss grenades back at enemies. Your personal inability to
single-handedly alter the course of the war truly hammers home just
how small each individual soldier truly was.
While the game’s single-player campaign is filled with
jaw-dropping scripted events that create a realistic battlefield
experience, it isn’t terribly challenging on the default
difficulty setting and can be completed in a rather short period of
time. Thankfully, Treyarch has made the game’s most
significant improvement in an area most important to its overall
longevity: multiplayer.
In last year’s game, online multiplayer was limited to
eight players at once. Now, however, the number has been bumped up
to 24, and the difference really shows.
Players can play as one of seven different character classes,
from scouts and heavy artillery to medics and support units. The
teamwork inherent in these different classes is astonishing when
they are all cohesively utilized.
The multiplayer modes offer typical fare, with typical
death-match and capture-the-flag games.
However, the game’s “War” mode lives up to its
name and then some ““ perhaps even more so than the
game’s single-player mode; you truly feel like you’re
fighting for control of Europe as you and your comrades hold down
your position against teams of opposing players.
Of course, the game isn’t without its issues.
The aiming controls are a tad wonky, especially when compared to
“Halo” and, more recently, “Gears of
War.”
The lack of an in-game crosshair adds to realism, but some
players may find that trying to fire a weapon without hitting the
left trigger to go into aiming mode results in lots of near
misses.
Regardless, “Call of Duty 3″ has raised the bar for
World War II shooters ““ with a stellar presentation and scads
of multiplayer options available, it’s a game that likely
won’t fall from its perch until “Call of Duty 4″
is released.