Call of Duty 3 Hands-On - Deeper Into Europe

Normandy Breakout

Push ahead in the campaign to liberate Paris in the third Call of Duty, in development at Treyarch.

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Activision released one of the most successful Xbox 360 games to date last year with Call of Duty 2, and now it's back with the third game in the popular World War II shooter series. As we've reported in our previous coverage, the game's development has been taken over by Treyarch from series creator Infinity Ward, and this time the action will focus on the Normandy Breakout campaign, which pushed from the Allied landing on D-day all the way to the liberation of Paris some weeks later. Call of Duty 3 is due on all the next-gen platforms--Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii--but until a recent Activision press event, we hadn't had the chance to see all three versions up and running simultaneously.

Having played all three games, we've gotten a feel for their relative merits, as well as the feel of Call of Duty 3 in general. Activision showed off different levels in each version, so we got to experience a broad cross-section of the sort of action the game will offer. In short, if you've played the previous Call of Duty games, you won't be terribly surprised by anything here, since the core conventions remain the same. Running from cover to cover, experiencing dramatic scripted events, using your iron sights to gun down Axis soldiers from afar--the gameplay here has remained basically the same from one installment to the next, which isn't really bad considering this series has consistently been among the most visceral and satisfying first-person shooters on the market.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, Treyarch has chosen to intensify the action elements that were already in place in past games. The team has promised a larger scope for the combat, and from what we saw during our time with the game, it seems to be delivering on those promises. In the Xbox 360 version, we played a mission in which we had to advance on an enemy position amidst a raging thunderstorm, trudging through a field filled with tall grass. It's not easy to make progress with the Germans raining fire down on you from up the hill, but luckily we had a tank on our side, and we had to keep close behind the tank and use it for cover as we moved along. On either side of us, we had allies scrambling through the cross fire, ducking behind cattle carcasses and diving among the individually modeled blades of grass in an effort to stay low.

Four Allied nationalities--American, British, Canadian, and Polish--are represented in Call of Duty 3's depiction of the Normandy Breakout campaign.

Later in the level, we met up with a larger squad of troops and moved through a path the tank had created toward our objective, which was a fortified Nazi position atop a small hill. But before we could move out into the clearing, a truck came roaring through the grass and exploded in front of us, kicking the firefight off with a bang. Once we got into the clearing, we found it extremely broad, with fortified machine gun positions along the top ridge. This area was large enough that when we died repeatedly trying to reach the top of the hill, we were able to attempt flanking either side of the enemy and using different routes to try out different strategies, before we finally found one that let us avoid enough of the cross fire to make it to the top and help take control of the hill. After cresting the hill, we were thrown to the ground and shell shocked by an incoming artillery blast, which initiated a first-person cutscene in which our allies had to drag us out, cursing our character's sorry butt all the way.

We spent the most time with the Xbox 360 demo and felt that it showcased Call of Duty 3's wider and busier levels most prominently. The PS3 demo level, the Forest, showed off a different sort of action. This one was a bit more linear, sending us down a heavily wooded corridor with Nazi soldiers hiding behind trees all along the way. We were fortunately armed with a scoped Springfield rifle, so we could pick off foes from a distance here, but the underbrush was so thick that going prone to steady our aim proved more trouble than it was worth. After intense tree-to-tree fighting, we finally reached the end of the level, where the Germans had dug trenches to establish a base and then populated it with far more soldiers than we thought we had a chance of realistically taking down.

You'll see nary a loading progress bar, as loading is covered up with a video mission briefing.

Some ballyhoo has been made of Call of Duty 3's seamless presentation of the Normandy Breakout campaign, which will have you playing as officers of the American, British, Canadian, and Polish forces in turn. The way this works is that you'll simply see a full-motion video briefing in place of the loading screen. In other words, as soon as one level is over, you'll move to a video showing maps and old footage that detail the particulars of your next mission, all while the data for that mission is streaming off the disc. So you won't actually be playing the game nonstop from start to finish, but you won't glimpse a loading bar, either, which will hopefully make the game feel more streamlined as you progress.

It's worth noting that the 360 and PS3 versions are identical in terms of content; the only difference we noticed is that you can thrust with the sixaxis controller on the PS3 to make your character do his melee attack (though you can still use the button if you want). The games looked quite similar, too, from what we could tell. The level of detail in the maps and characters has been noticeably ramped up from Call of Duty 2, such as with the aforementioned individual grass blades and rays of light filtering through the trees. The characters' facial expressions, clothing, and animations are also appreciably more realistic than in the past. You'd be hard pressed to say which version looks better, especially since they're both running in 720p resolution, but neither one is a slouch in the visual department.