Title: Call of Duty 3

Date: 12.20.2006

Genre: FPS

Platform: Xbox 360

Developer: Treyarch

Publisher: Activision

I must start off with a rant here: infinite enemy respawns is a poor excuse for sloppy level design. You're fighting a war; fair enough, you'll come across lots of enemies. But rarely, if ever, should you come across situations where you need to kill hundreds of them within a few hours. Respawns can work if done right: Gears of War uses emergence holes which pop out a few enemies before closing, giving players the option to attempt to seal it before it gets out of hand, or play conservatively and take on whatever comes out. That's an effective way of utilizing what would otherwise be a cheap way of increasing difficulty.

Yet, unrestricted respawns is exactly what the Call of Duty series is built on, especially with Call of Duty 3. COD1 didn't have respawns; the game would just throw tons of enemies at you, but at least there was an end to the madness. COD: UO was innovative, but began to include certain sections that did have respawns. COD2 included a few more. In COD3, it seems that every corner contains the whole German army. In short, it sucks.

Taking things back a bit before my spleen explodes, COD3 gives us another round of the usual fight-your-way-across-Europe WWII theme that's been done to death. To be fair, COD3 does make a good attempt to revitalize a series on the verge of being a stale franchise like FIFA. COD3 retains the cinematic feel of its predecessors, and noticeably includes a deeper plot with more character development than previous games, including notable reappearances of characters like Major Ingram and Sergeant Doyle from COD and CODUO. COD3 adds a greater sense of heroic deeds than a realistic portrayal of the war, which is great for story development but a big sacrifice for an immersive atmosphere.

COD3 deviates from the previous Russian-British-American campaign formula. Instead, the game focuses on the Normandy Breakout and allows players to assume the roles of soldiers in the American infantry, British SAS alongside the French Resistance, Canadian Highlanders and the Polish tank divisions. The game starts off with a rather superficial tutorial level before taking part in the battle for St. Lo, leading to sabotage operations, tank-driving missions and epic stands in and around the bloody Falaise Gap. While the change in playable nations is welcome, gameplay-wise it kills the diversity of previous titles. The British, Canadians and Polish all use the same weapons anyway, making game progression a bit more tedious than what fans of the series might expect.

Instead of bridging missions with historical backgrounds, COD3 mixes informative briefings with cut-scenes of the game's characters. These cut-scenes are superbly done and add the much needed depth to the characters of Call of Duty instead of simply being expendable names. In fact, the game does away with random cannon fodder and provides players with a substantial number of permanent team mates. The game still spawns random troops to aid you, but their contribution is less noticeable compared to having the same reliable squad members. Unfortunately, since main characters only die from scripted events, this does make them unbelievably indestructible. Interestingly though; the lengthy cut-scenes are used as a cover to load the rest of the mission. While it is substantially better than a black loading screen, the inability to skip these cut-scenes makes for a very stale loading experience. As great as they are, I would appreciate a faster-loading black screen; it's like watching the same anticlimactic chapter from Saving Private Ryan every time you load a level.

For veterans of COD and COD2, the core gameplay is still solid, for better or worse. COD3 is still an action-packed shooter, though it lacks any sort of tactical element and is still heavily scripted. The game still feels as if nothing has changed, however. The objectives are still the same: follow this team, attack this point, defend this location against all odds. Seriously, it gets stale eventually. Thankfully, COD3 introduces some nifty features that make the game more digestible to players who have seen everything COD has to offer.

The first ‘cool' thing players notice is the new button-pressing mini-games that frequently appear throughout levels. Instead of pressing a button to instantly plant a demolition charge, players now have to manually perform the action. Running up to a Flak 88, players need to press a button to stick the explosives on, rotate the right stick to insert the fuse, then press another button to pull the safety pin. Even cooler are the hand-to-hand combat events, usually consisting of a German soldier hiding in the corner and jumping out at you with his rifle or knife. The player pulls the left and right triggers to force the enemy back, followed up by another button press to finish off the stunned enemy, and repeat until the enemy is dead. Other scenarios include using cranes and rowing a boat. It's a pretty interesting concept and adds variety to gameplay, but the events are all scripted, which removes something that could have been developed into something deeper.

The second noticeable addition to COD3 is a much more elaborate objective-branching system. COD2 introduced limited sections that allowed players to complete objectives in any order they wanted. COD3 takes the idea further by offering players choices as to which approach to take towards an objective, often with another squad taking the other approach, resulting a simultaneous assault; fairly remarkable for Call of Duty. Other sections involve two objectives that offer the choice of which to do first, followed by another approach to the second. Like the button-mashing features, the idea is half-baked. Making choices doesn't affect the game in any way, as different approaches offer little mutual support and objectives are not made any easier by taking a certain one out first.

And in spite of these small-but-nifty features, COD3 contains some horrible elements, first of which is the intolerable AI. When COD1 came out, the AI was impressive because other games were more akin to interactive shooting galleries. You would think with better processing power in next-gen consoles, developers might actually improve AI behavior. COD3 doesn't. When you play games like GRAW, Rainbow Six or even Gears of War, you become accustomed to how much initiative an AI player can have, and in many cases it's workable or even enjoyable. COD3 features no initiative. COD2 players might remember how annoying it was to see AI team mates cower behind walls until the player passed an invisible waypoint, which pushed the other team mates up to another point where they can cower behind cover. COD3 does the exact same thing.

Take a frustratingly common example: let's say I'm in a trench, and there's one enemy around the corner. If I go around that corner, it's likely that I will instantly die. I'm bracketed by two AI team mates who are in a better position to do something. If I provided covering fire, they could run up and knock the guy out. They won't. If they would provide cover fire for me, I could do the same. They won't. I can't tell them to do anything. The AI won't do anything until I cross that magical line that tells them to move up.

And I can't cross that magical line because the game's respawning enemies won't let me. This is the infuriating element of COD3. It's not that bad if you play on Easy or Normal, but on higher difficulties the respawn rate simply won't allow you to make any progress. What you get is a conflict of actions: to stop you from rushing forward, the game spawns enemies when you kill them; to stop the respawn, you have to rush forward. You basically end up performing suicide rushes in the hope that you might cross that magical line to move your invincible team mates up and stop the incessant flow of enemies. And you don't know where the respawns are. There's little difference between an infinite respawn section and a section that requires you to defeat a disproportionate number of enemies. It promotes reckless playing styles, and the game punishes reckless playing styles. What's wrong with letting the player decide how to approach a tactical situation? Why must COD3 reward the completion of insurmountable challenges by throwing more of them at you?

On the presentation side, the game is a drastic improvement over COD2. The sound and music are top-notch as usual, lending more of a heroic feeling than the foreboding themes of COD2. Visually, the game looks and feels like a huge improvement. The environments are fantastic; Treyarch did their on-site research well. The towns are carefully modeled and incorporated into missions; the country scenes look dashing in sun or rain, and the character models are impeccably modeled with soaked mud-stained uniforms. In fact, the graphics are so good, it's a bad thing. It seems Treyarch tried too hard to show off the Xbox 360's dynamic lighting capability, resulting in guns that look like chrome-plated custom-made weapons, and the notorious shiny-helmet syndrome. You could be forgiven for thinking that all soldiers wore white helmets, because regardless of the weather, they're that bright. It's impossible to miss a headshot simply because of the sticky-aim combined with the shiny helmets.

Overall, COD3 seems to have continued the cycle of development from COD. COD brought great single player gameplay; CODUO suffered in lack of single player innovation but revamped multiplayer. COD2 axed good multiplayer for single player experience. COD3 has frustrating single player but again revamped the multiplayer aspect with vehicles and a class-system similar to Battlefield, giving players the ability to act as a rifleman, assault trooper or medic, among others. Unfortunately, at the time of release the Ranked Match function seems broken, taken upwards of 20 minutes to successfully join a game with no guarantee of dropping out.

I admit, I might be being harsh on COD3. For a standalone game, COD3 is actually a very good game. The presentation is outstanding, the atmosphere is great and the gameplay is an awesome experience albeit with some frustrating elements, and the multiplayer is addictive and easy to pick up. However, as someone who has played the COD series since its PC days, as would many others in my position, COD3 fails to make a significant step forward from COD2 and instead degenerates into poor design covered with sloppy gameplay elements, ending up looking more like a pre-release game than a COD masterpiece. COD3 isn't necessarily a step back, but compared to other games released at the same time, COD3 isn't much of a step forward either.

Game Score

B-

Reviewed By: Contributed