First person shooting on Wii is playable, fun and fresh. But it's a severely rushed port lacking polish and multiplayer.
The campaign in Call of Duty 3 manages to avoid the cliches, thankfully. You won't be storming the beaches of Normandy in yet another rendition of D-Day. Instead, this game picks up after that monumental assault and focuses on a pincer attack by the Americans, Canadians, Poles, British and French to drive the Axis forces out of the French village of Chambois. This sees you shifting protagonists alternately between these five squads throughout the game.
The good news is that this means you'll see yourself with a different set of squad mates from chapter to chapter, starting with a different set of weapons and with focus on different goals. You'll also see yourself interacting with different characters throughout this game's story, in a move by developer Treyarch to put a heavier emphasis on the narrative than in previous games in the series.
The bad news is that the whole story and characterization agenda starts to feel forced. Even with cut scenes that open each chapter, so little is made of these characters during actual firefights or battle scenarios that you start to forget who they are. When some of the characters bite the dust, you may be upset only because other characters call out for them, as if you're being reminded that the unfortunate sap had a name - not because you've actually grown attached to them. In fact, any remorse feels almost obligatory instead of instinctual. With the story being somewhat of a throwaway, then, it's frustrating that none of the cinematics can be skipped - especially when all you're itching to do is point and shoot rabid Nazi soldiers with your Wii remote.
The entire point of this game - with this port, especially - is to shoot mean people in the face. The Call of Duty staple of aiming down the site of your gun is there with a quick press of the A button. It's still a wonderful mechanic that allows you to more effectively draw a bead on your enemy with tactical considerations regarding slower movement speed and more limited peripheral vision. The real change here is in the console's controller. Picking up the Wii remote and handling it like a gun seems like an intuitive and natural action, but in practice this isn't the case. Since the sensing technology is based on relative pointing and not an absolute "point at the screen" mechanic, the feel resembles that of a laser pointer rather than a gun. As a result, it starts off feeling awkward as your hand tries to adjust its movements to what your eyes see on the screen regardless of the control method you choose.
By default, Call of Duty 3 on the Wii adopts a free aiming reticule in a scheme it calls "Dynamic Aim". Your hand movements directly place the reticule at a relative point on the screen. How quickly you turn, look up, or look down depends on how far and fast from the center of the screen you move your reticule. With the sensitivity settings turned all the way up, you almost get mouse-like sensitivity. A potential problem pops up when you consider that you will be aiming at people that aren't in the center of your screen, but once you start firing your viewpoint "locks" to the location you fire at. This isn't lock-on control, however, so you're spared from the game babysitting you as if you'd never played a shooter before.
The other setting tries to emulate a mouse, and seems like what people have been clamoring for; however, it fails to impress. Long story short, Dynamic Aim is the way to go. It works incredibly well once you get the hang of it, though it can admittedly can take half an hour if not more. What you get is the ability to turn almost as fast as you would with a mouse, while giving you the control to aim and shoot at targets all over the screen without having to change your viewpoint if you don't want to. What this means is that in midrange combat, you can keep an eye on every enemy you plan to hit - but you're also given enough speed with which to turn around and engage enemies at your sides and behind you. Plus, the sensation of moving your hand, looking down the site of your gun on-screen, and pulling the B trigger physically just "feels right."
The motion controls extend beyond aiming with the remote and incorporate the nunchuk attachment for other mechanics. The simple ones work well. Reloading is done with a quick upward snap, and changing weapons is done with a quick shake to the left or right. You can do these same actions with the d-pad and minus button on the remote, but in relation to the more frequently used A button some may find the placement of those buttons awkward. Using the nunchuk for these actions is still very responsive and works as a very adequate substitute. Where it doesn't work quite so well is in grenade-throwing. Regardless of how hard or fast you make a throwing motion with your left hand, the grenade doesn't respond accordingly. Furthermore, you're required to press a button first to activate the grenade. It's easier in this case to shift your hand - no matter how awkward it is - to press the d-pad either left (frag grenade) or right (smoke grenade) and release it when you've cooked the grenade to your desire.
Things get even worse with the additional non-shooting gameplay elements that Treyarch added to this year's game. You'll find yourself getting into tug-of-war fights with enemy soldiers who try to grab your weapon from you. These are all scripted, which means you can never ambush an enemy soldier and try to disarm him if you so choose to. What's worse is that the motion for this involves you jabbing forward alternately with the nunchuk and remote. It's not difficult at all to pull off, but actually figuring out how to do it correctly is a chore because the on-screen cues don't make it clear. (Here's a tip: make sure the buttons on the remote and the analog stick on the nunchuk are facing your chest.) Other non-shooting actions include planting an explosive charge, driving, manipulating a mortar cannon and rowing. The controls for planting aren't sensitive enough, and the controls for driving are way too sensitive. Furthermore, driving and planting are too commonplace for the trouble they cause. The other two functions, however, feel fantastic especially because you need to manage them in the thick of things. Yet, you can count the number of times you do them collectively on one hand.
Given the inconsistent responsiveness with the controllers, Call of Duty 3 seems like the token rushed port. The visuals only pound this notion into your head, with a wobbly mix of somewhat overall detailed environments and decent character models with nasty textures and jarring glitches. Sure, surveying the landscape down the hill from your barricade or looking at that house you've got to storm from a few yards away shows some nice coloring, architecture and landscape design. The volumetric smoke billowing out from explosions and smoke grenades, not to mention the mass destruction going on around you, is impressive. However, it's all overshadowed once you get up close and personal to that smudgy tank or wall texture that would almost look like a holdover from the Nintendo 64 era were it not for the 480p presentation. You'll also see enemies' arms clipping through walls, shadows cast on the ceiling by characters who are above you, and geometric popping as you approach complex structures. We're not talking about a super-powered HD console with the Wii, and these types of glitches are likely the result of sloppy work as opposed to hardware - but whatever the reason, what we get is severely unpolished.
It's a good thing that the presentation is bolstered by phenomenal sound work. The voice acting for the cut scenes are average at worst, but more frequently provides plenty of personality to each of the characters you encounter. The sounds of mid-century war arsenals are as varied, loud and fearful as ever, with machine gun fire pattering in the distance and the hurried commands of your Nazi enemies closing in on your squad of soldiers. The orchestral score is once again well done and evokes fear, disaster, courage and victory at appropriate times; the obligatory brass and drums with solid string work mimics the Saving Private Ryan experience.
The sound serves as the only truly bright spot in the game's production values, however; in addition to the hurried visual look that the game sports, the Wii version entirely leaves out multiplayer. Missing online support is somewhat understandable, since Nintendo did not seem to provide sufficient tools for many third party launch title developers. But gamers aren't even offered 2-player split-screen. Once you've spent your eight to ten hours soldiering through the game's fourteen completely linear chapters (save for maybe two or three spots where you can choose one of a few routes to the same result), you're done. As engaging as the shooting experience is the first time around, it seems to be missing that compelling "something" that previous developer Infinity Ward was able to inject into its single player campaigns the first two times around for the series. Therefore, you'd be hard pressed to play it again "just to play it" unless you need World War II shooters hooked up to your veins through an IV.
Call of Duty 3 succeeds as a starting point for first person shooter mechanics on the Nintendo Wii. It's playable, it's fun, and it's fresh - going back to a mouse somehow felt almost boring once in awhile. Yet, that's pretty much all that this port has to offer. The rush to push this out for launch left out several graphical touch-ups and any incentive to play this for more than ten hours, and many of the additional gameplay elements aren't fun and just don't work well with the motion controls. If you're looking for proof that first-person shooting can be done very well on the first try, you really should experience Call of Duty 3 on Wii - but actually purchasing it is an iffy proposition.