Articles
By Diresim
Published: Mar. 18, 2007 2:56 PM
Infinity Ward’s World War II shooter, Call of Duty 2, was one of Microsoft's biggest selling Xbox 360 launch titles. It really showed off the technical capabilities of the console, whilst also proving a remarkably gripping experience, both online and off. When the reins were handed over to Treyarch to develop the next installment in the franchise, Call of Duty 3, the collective breath taken by COD fans could be heard around the world. Treyarch are no slouches, but Infinity Ward have proven they know how to get the job done. Whilst I wish I could say the team at Treyarch did as good a job as IW, unfortunately COD 3 doesn’t reach the heights that its predecessor did. Whilst the single player offering is solid, and certainly entertaining, and the multiplayer gameplay is more robust than COD 2’s, the final code does fall short in a number of very important areas.
Treyarch haven’t strayed too much from the core single player gameplay found in COD 2. This time around, however, you control the British, American, Polish and Canadian forces as they attempt to gain a stranglehold on the Normandy region during the 2nd World War. As each of the missions is part of a larger, united offensive, the story is a lot more cohesive than Infinity Ward’s product, and there is some surprisingly strong character development at work in amongst all the shooting. Each playable nation has a handful of characters who are nicely fleshed out by intelligent cutscenes and plentiful battlefield chatter. At it’s core, the game still revolves around getting from checkpoint to checkpoint, accomplishing a variety of objectives along the way. Storming Nazi bunkers, holding off counter-attacks, blowing stuff up. However, the process is not as hellishly fun as it was in the previous game. There are still some wonderfully exciting scenarios thrown at you, and the locations are very well designed, but it just doesn’t come together like it should and really nail you.
The main reason for this is the poor AI scripting. Due to the fact that they’re an expendable commodity (they are replaced when they’re killed off), your comrades in battle are next to useless. Sure they’ll get off a few shots here and there, but their scripting is such that they effectively rely on you triggering them to advance, which can get very annoying when you’re alone on the frontline with a tree stump for cover. Germans pounding you left right and center, and your buddies are hanging out fifty metres away huddling behind a truck while they wait for you to cross an invisible line. Sure you can try a different route and sometimes they’ll behave differently, but this game on veteran (which is the only difficulty to play, if you want a challenge) requires enough trial and error as it is.
The enemy AI is even more frustrating. On veteran, they will headshot you from a kilometer away with a sub-machine gun, but miss you from point blank. They will stay in cover often, and react to situations realistically on occasions, but they will also run around like headless chooks during some sequences, stacking up at doorways clipping each other and being strangely unable to shoot whilst moving.
You see the AI is programmed to come at you in waves. You kill an enemy, and whilst inching forward, another takes his place. You kill him, and then another arrives. The only way to halt this progression is to advance forward hurriedly and block the AI’s target area. With the complete lack of brains of some of your brothers in arms, this can be an extremely dangerous endeavour though, and at times you’ll have to settle for kicking back and picking off every single one of the buggers once they’ve spawned. This can, and often does, become very tedious, especially as the checkpoints are few and far between, and you might kill thirty or forty enemies, only to eventually die and have to do it all over again before advancing. It just feels cheap, cheap, cheap, especially compared to the much more realistic AI routines of the enemies in COD 2.
Tryarch has implemented a number of new gameplay ideas, the most obvious of which are the interactive cutscenes. These entail the player being prompted to hit a combination of keys in order to successfully navigate a certain task during a little mini cutscene. Setting up bombs, turning valves and even hand to hand combat are accomplished using this mechanic, but it ends up breaking up the experience, especially as you are effectively invincible to anything that is happening outside of the current script. Tapping a, then b, then a again to drop a slab of concrete on a bunch of Germans who are ripping through you with automatic fire just feels wrong. You should be dead.
The weapons are pretty similar to what we’ve had before, and they feel pretty much the same too. The physics are a real highlight, however. There will be explosions, there will be bodies flying everywhere, and you will get a kick out of it, no doubt. The sound is fantastic too. If you are excited about this game, and you don’t have a 5.1 setup yet, go get one before playing it. The audio is just that good.
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