The damage system is back from last year’s title and I am happy. For me it was always fun to have to guess how many more shots you can take before ducking behind cover so that health could regenerate. Treyarch added a few gameplay elements that really add to the insanity of battles, first the hand-to-hand combat pits you against your foe with only the butt of your gun as a weapon. Using the RT and LT buttons to fight you can easily take out opponents in this mode. Next they gave gamers the ability to do something that you always wanted to do, and could actually have done had you been in WWII in real life, pick up enemy grenades and toss them back at the bad guy. This little feature is a lot more fun than I just made it sound so you should definitely be excited about this addition. Easily the best additions to gameplay that the developers have thrown in are the new “timed events”. In the old COD games if you wanted to place a charge all you had to do is press one button, now in COD 3 when doing this you have to do a series of actions on the controller such as spinning the right joystick counter-clockwise and then pressing a number of button combinations. Call of Duty 3 takes a great gameplay mechanic from its predecessor and adds to it to make one hell of a fun game. The single player campaign is long and gets the job done.
Call of Duty 3 has enough substance to be a great game if it was only an offline campaign (look to the PS3 version for example) but with the Xbox 360 version we also get one hell of a multiplayer mode. Everything that made COD2 popular online last year is back, but that’s not all, Treyarch also added a bunch of new things to the multiplayer portion of this game to make it last a good time longer on Xbox Live. Before you go onto Xbox Live you can fire the game up with three of your buddies via split screen or system link. Playing on the same TV is fun and all, but the Call of Duty franchise was made for online war. Gone are the days of small matches with just a few people and a lot of lag, in the 3rd game in the series we get 24 person battles and all the matches we played experienced minimal to zero lag. The modes to play are deathmatch, team battle, capture the flag, headquarters, and a War mode that designates a random zone that each team must capture and protect for as long as possible. Want vehicles? You got em. There are bikes, tanks, trucks and jeeps all at your disposal to transport you around the extra large maps.
Speaking of maps, there are plenty of them and they are vast levels with numerous different spots to hide in or make a team stand at. If you have ever played games like Team Fortress Classic or Counter-Strike then you know what “classes” are, COD3 takes advantage of this class system and allows you to pick which type of grunt you’re going to be. If you feel like healing people choose to be a medic, wanna take out tanks then choose armor support. While it is a pretty simple system it adds a unique dynamic to the Call of Duty games and makes for some really interesting online battles. Basically this game has a single player that ranks up there with any other Call of Duty game and a multiplayer that is better than any one you have played before.
Graphically COD3 took what COD2 did right and made it better. COD2 was easily the best looking launch game for the 360 and while this doesn’t compare to the likes of Gears of War it is still a great looking game and definitely worthy of being called a “next-generation title”. From the time the first level loads up anyone will be impressed with the overall graphical style of Call of Duty 3. It is not just a tad bit better looking than its prequel but leaps and bounds above it. The extra time developers have had with the 360 hardware shows today and the first thing I noticed was the trees, bushes, etc. Everything around you looks lifelike and works hard to immerse you in the WWII universe, what’s more it succeeds with flying colors. Not only do the trees look cool but the wind/rain effects are simply amazing. On the second level you will move through a very dense forest while it is raining and it is easily one of the best looking levels I have seen in a first-person shooter. The word that should be picked up from me about the graphical department is details, and everything is detailed as it would look in real life. Something new added in terms of visuals is a thing that can be found in a lot of next-gen games, and was first shown in Red Octane, a PS2 title – destructible environments are cool looking and they add a small dynamic to the game when you are trying to get cover. Like I said before Call of Duty 3 is not the best Xbox 360 game out there, but it is easily in the top 5 and if you’re a graphics person you will be happy with what the developers have done here.
