First Impression: Call of Duty 3 (Wii)
Posted on
Thursday, December 07, 2006
by Gary A. Ballard
The Nintendo Wii is made for first-person shooters. I can come to no other conclusions. While there are certainly flaws to the paradigm of using the Wiimote as a shooting device, it makes console shooters playable to the mouse and keyboard brigade members such as me. My latest foray into Wii shooting territory is Activision's Call of Duty 3, a WWII-genre cinematic shooter.
Those familiar with the Call of Duty or Medal of Honor franchises will recognize the type of game. Rather than being a run-and-gun affair such as Unreal Tournament, both series are known for being heavily scripted linear shooters. The main selling point is their cinematic experience, which translates into their attempts to recreate the sights, sounds and feelings evoked by the Normandy landing scene of Saving Private Ryan, as well as that movie's soldier interaction. Call of Duty 3 does so quite well. The battlefield is littered with debris, cover is plentiful and necessary, bullets whiz by constantly tearing up dirt and concrete all around the player, tanks rumble back and forth and the whole scene is generally a chaotic experience of which your character is a participant. The player doesn't drive the story so much as push it along. The core design philosophy does a good job at immersing the player in his role as a soldier as opposed to the typical shooter mentality of individual soldier as walking death god.
My impressions here are based off of my first two hours of play. On normal difficulty with a not insignificant number of deaths, that equates to about two full missions. The most impressive factor of the game's design has got to be the sound, and that's something I've seen on every Wii title I've played. From Zelda to Red Steel to Call of Duty, the sound is crisp, clear and rich. CoD3's sound design is particularly immersive, with its impressive collection of bullets, explosions and German curses. The controls are responsive, much more so than analog sticks would be for shooters. Just based on the control scheme alone, I'd suggest that anyone wanting to play CoD3 should play it on the Wii or the PC, unless you really really like analog sticks with shooters. The difference really is amazing.
The Wii has gotten knocked a good bit for having a "last-gen" graphics chip, and I'm sure many of the reviews I've seen that have given good Wii games lower scores are judging their graphics against PS3 and 360 Hi-Def graphics. That's an unfair comparison. CoD3 on the Wii has more than enough graphic gusto. It might not be as visually stunning as the 360 version of the game, but it's graphics, especially character graphics, are pretty spectacular. The game's color palette is somewhat muted, which is to be expected in a Europeon-based WWII shooter. That actually serves a gameplay function as well, as many of the German uniforms use camouflage and can thus be harder to distinguish among the rubble and mud and grass, an artistic choice that also befits the genre.
The game is one with enough polish and fun to be among the top launch titles on the system. My first impression is that it's a title worth buying or renting, depending on how much you want to spend on one single-player game. I'll update my thoughts as I make my way through the game.
Those familiar with the Call of Duty or Medal of Honor franchises will recognize the type of game. Rather than being a run-and-gun affair such as Unreal Tournament, both series are known for being heavily scripted linear shooters. The main selling point is their cinematic experience, which translates into their attempts to recreate the sights, sounds and feelings evoked by the Normandy landing scene of Saving Private Ryan, as well as that movie's soldier interaction. Call of Duty 3 does so quite well. The battlefield is littered with debris, cover is plentiful and necessary, bullets whiz by constantly tearing up dirt and concrete all around the player, tanks rumble back and forth and the whole scene is generally a chaotic experience of which your character is a participant. The player doesn't drive the story so much as push it along. The core design philosophy does a good job at immersing the player in his role as a soldier as opposed to the typical shooter mentality of individual soldier as walking death god.
My impressions here are based off of my first two hours of play. On normal difficulty with a not insignificant number of deaths, that equates to about two full missions. The most impressive factor of the game's design has got to be the sound, and that's something I've seen on every Wii title I've played. From Zelda to Red Steel to Call of Duty, the sound is crisp, clear and rich. CoD3's sound design is particularly immersive, with its impressive collection of bullets, explosions and German curses. The controls are responsive, much more so than analog sticks would be for shooters. Just based on the control scheme alone, I'd suggest that anyone wanting to play CoD3 should play it on the Wii or the PC, unless you really really like analog sticks with shooters. The difference really is amazing.
The Wii has gotten knocked a good bit for having a "last-gen" graphics chip, and I'm sure many of the reviews I've seen that have given good Wii games lower scores are judging their graphics against PS3 and 360 Hi-Def graphics. That's an unfair comparison. CoD3 on the Wii has more than enough graphic gusto. It might not be as visually stunning as the 360 version of the game, but it's graphics, especially character graphics, are pretty spectacular. The game's color palette is somewhat muted, which is to be expected in a Europeon-based WWII shooter. That actually serves a gameplay function as well, as many of the German uniforms use camouflage and can thus be harder to distinguish among the rubble and mud and grass, an artistic choice that also befits the genre.
The game is one with enough polish and fun to be among the top launch titles on the system. My first impression is that it's a title worth buying or renting, depending on how much you want to spend on one single-player game. I'll update my thoughts as I make my way through the game.
Labels: Video Games, Wii
posted by Gary A. Ballard @ 1:14 PM
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