Reviews// Call of Duty 3: Review (Wii)

Call of Duty needs no introduction - in an earlier incarnation it was the most spectacularly successful of all Xbox 360 launch titles. That's a trick that Activision would love to imitate on Wii launch, especially as Nintendo seems certain to get more Wiis into Christmas stockings this year than Microsoft managed Xbox 360s last year.

Call of Duty 3 brings a lot of new technology to the series, most of it aimed at exploiting the power of the new generation consoles: the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Wii isn't in their league from a graphical point of view, but Activision has gone to town on using the Wii's unique control system to make this version something special. Has it succeeded? Read on and discover.

As I said in the previous paragraph, Activision and developer Treyarch have brought a lot of new technology to this game - most immediately noticeable is the laser scanning that all the weapons and uniforms have been subjected to. This produces subliminal details, such as each soldier's kit being slightly different, that don't shout at you, but that your brain notices, and that make the game more immersive and involving. The result is a level or realism not achieved before in any combat action game.

The thing about CoD is that it's a first-person shooter: a genre that has traditionally benefited from the PC mouse-and-keyboard control method. While FPSs like Half Life and Quake have been successful on consoles like the PS2 and Xbox, they have been nowhere near as popular as their PC brethren.

The Call of Duty series has worked hard to overcome this issue, trying to make the most of the joy-pad to create an intuitive and flexible control method for interacting with the game. It's a testimony to the skill of the game designers that they've been so successful with a tool that has considerable limitations.

With the Wii, they have been unleashed from these limitations. Although the latest console joy-pads all have dual analogue controls, the way you move about the game-world on CoDWii (as I quickly began calling the game... later it became fishpiss, but that's just puerile, and if I was to tell you that, Activision would surely not be amused, at all) is to use the Wii Remote and the Nunchuck controllers in tandem. You swing the Wii Remote around (wildly at first, and then after the vertigo and disorientation subside, more judiciously) to look around the game-world. So immediately, you can look up and down, left and right with the same controller - 3D - a paradigm shift.

You use the (counter intuitively named) Nunchuk controller's thumb-stick to move your character around. Moving left or right strafes; moving it forwards, advances; moving it backwards (and I'll have none of this in Call of Duty III because the liberty of Western Europe and specifically Paris depends on you) retreats. So, from the get-go, navigation in CoDWii is better than on any other console. While I found that looking around proved to be perfect when playing on a huge screen, when I played on a small screen the system just felt too sensitive - it would be nice to be able to calibrate it to your own preferences.

Apart from the smashing control system, CoDWii is pretty similar to Call of Duty 3 on other platforms. It's not as visually stunning as on the Xbox 360, but it looks about as good as the PS2 version. And really, it's about going to France and getting shot at, just like our valiant lads did in World War 2 (of course, with the World being American now, by our lads, I mean their lads, and when I say going too France to get shot at, I mean going to Margate to impregnate English women).