One of the better things is changing weapons, which you do by gesture control. Simply move the Nunchuck quickly left or right and you'll cycle through your available weapons. For me this is a marked improvement in the gameplay. Whereas before, I tended to soldier on with the wrong weapon, rather than waste time swapping, on CoDWii I quickly found myself flicking my right hand to select a more appropriate weapon.
And now the less good: Left on the D-pad throws a grenade. This reveals that the Wii D-pad is just a trifle too far forward for comfort - and as you change the position of your hand your aim moves. So you take a second or so to re-target; but holding left down "cooks" the grenade before throwing it. This has the same effect as holding the grenade after pulling the pin out would have in real life. So, when you eventually do throw it (assuming you don't hold on to it too long and turn yourself into a particularly nice meat jam) it goes off as it reaches the target, rather than bouncing off to explode harmlessly into a ditch, or giving the German commander time to shout "Achtung, Dieter, jumpen on zee grenade, unt acht as ein human shield" at his willingly suicidal subordinates.
The problem here is because you need to re-target every time you throw a grenade, it's almost impossible to throw one on-target with a full-length fuse. It's a niggle, to be sure, but a significant one in an otherwise excellent control system.
And there's more in the 'not so good' camp: I found myself struggling to get through doorways on occasion and sometimes being trapped by computer-controlled characters who surrounded me in constricted spaces, but didn't have the good sense to back off when they became ensnared. These (rare) occurrences didn't ruin the game, nor make it unplayable - but they spoiled the fun and flow a little.
You may have detected a note a cynicism in this review. Maybe you picked up a pacifist vibe. You may even have misinterpreted the “pinko faggit” anti-war sentiments as disapproval of the game. But you'd be very wrong. I love Call of Duty, in fact, I think that it would be a far, far, far better thing if any country who was in dudgeon with another, instead of sending its youngest, fittest and finest to some foreign field to do a job demonstrably done better by sandbags, sent them to a secret bunker in a neutral country to settle matters by means of a network Call of Duty game. Sure, there would be no lucrative "reconstruction" contracts for the victorious president to hand out to his cronies, but how many lives is the stock price of Haliburton worth? Its balance sheet is written in blood.
Settling all future wars this way would of course require an Xbox 360 version of the game, because the Wii version lacks any multi-player options whatsoever - local or network. Again, given the Wii's network, and Internet friendliness, this is a disappointment, and one that stops the game scoring top marks.
SPOnG Rating B+
Call of Duty is an excellent game, and the Wii version is a poster boy for the possibilities brought to game-play by the new platform, and its innovative control method. But Call of Duty 3 is also a Wii pioneer, and while Activision has got many things spot on, there are a few that still need a little polishing. The addition of multi-player would have lifted this to an A rating. But without it, and with the few faults it has, it's a very good, but not great game. I’ll be buying it with my Wii, and – as a group - SPOnG urges you to do the same.
