Call of Duty 3

Available on: Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii, and now PC (Steam)
Played it on: Xbox
Approximate Playtime: 10 hours

RATING: 5/10

Call of Duty 3 is different. It's still a first person World War II shooter, like its predecessors, but it's just very different. While it seems at times like it's much better than the previous titles, there is definitely something... lacking.

It starts off in the rather generic way of having the main character, a private, do target practice. Suddenly, mission! I really appreciated how the last two console Call of Duty games didn't do that. It was a war, go do war stuff. No target practice, it's World War II! Even Finest Hour didn't have that. The main character in that game started with nothing but a clip of Mosin-Nagant ammo, and was told to pick up a rifle when someone with a rifle died. That's a great start. And it's the same way with Big Red One. The game starts by throwing the player in as the Sergeant of the squadron, and then goes back in time and has the campaign play the game through the eyes of a private to lead up to the events that occurred in the first mission. Again, a great narrative tool. Target practice? I don't need that. At all. EVER. And it's even terrible for game developers because players see the target practice and say, "Well this will be generic and un-original." And you know what? They're right.

The problem is that it's fairly easy to see where Call of Duty 3 went wrong. It's not as if there's just something that you can't put your finger on, there's just things that are blatantly wrong. The voice acting is decent enough, and it's actually fairly on the good side as far as shooters are concerned, so there's not much of a problem there. When someone dies, or there is an explosion, or there is gunfire, the characters respond appropriately. This is why, initially, I was willing to overlook the target practice time waster in favor of the real start of the game. Immediately, however, something else was awry.

The characters in Call of Duty 3 may as well be robots with good voices. The animations look unnatural, the characters' arms are a little too long, the legs are a little too short, the animations are over-exaggerated (a problem even recently released games still run into... *cough, cough, RAGE, cough*). It just doesn't add up in a brutally violent environment like the Second World War. And, like RAGE, the rest of the world is rendered quite well. The character animations just don't add up to what the world is trying to convey. Why RAGE didn't learn from Call of Duty 3 is beyond me.

The game feel isn't that great, either. On top of the fact that it's not that pretty to look at, there are many elements in the game that just don't allow the player to become a part of the game world. The most obvious is the gun recoil. The first gun that the game hands the player is an M1 Garand, a relatively basic Allied rifle, along with an M1928A1 Thompson. The Garand feels great; it's accurate, and has the recoil and power one would expect from a semi-automatic rifle. The Thompson, however, is terrible. The recoil is off the scale, the accuracy varies from pinpoint to "unable to hit the broad side of a barn," and it doesn't feel at all like the Thompson from previous games. This is a problem that persists for almost every single machine gun in the game, save the German MP40, which is so accurate it could hit a fly's wings at two hundred yards. Or at least compared to the Thompson, it could. It's weird, because there are very brief moments where it feels like a modern Call of Duty game, but it also seems to cling too hard to its past. It starts to have the exact same problems that Call of Duty: Finest Hour had, which means that the game series actually regressed a bit. That is something that never bodes well.

As for the writing, it's hard to say whether or not it's any good. I feel like it is, but because it doesn't really stand out in any special way, it's overshadowed by all the problems the game has. There's not enough to draw a player in in order to focus on the plot because there are too many surface problems that keep the player from really enjoying the game. It's unfortunate, really, when a sequel is worse than it's previous game.

So what does Call of Duty 3 amount to? Not much, sadly. It makes significant steps back from Big Red One, it doesn't quite look right, it doesn't quite feel right, and it's not very engaging or fun to play for very long. It might be worth playing if you'd like to play every Call of Duty game, but otherwise, it's not worth it.