Not at all like the PC version in many ways, one being: It's not nearly as good.
User Rating: 7 | Call of Duty MOBI
In October of 2003, a PC game known as Call of Duty appeared out of nowhere and blew everyone away. It had one of the most immersive single player campaigns in any WWII game, and possibly more than any other First Person Shooter. The game made you really feel like you were rushing forward with allies to take back Stalingrad or set up the beacon that guided the American paratroopers to Berlin as you took out Nazis. Later in 2003, a console version along with a cell phone version of Call of Duty was announced (and later an N-Gage version). I now have this cell phone version, and I have to say, it's not at all like the PC version. Call of Duty puts you in a ton of missions, which many are loosely based on the PC version's mission. You have to pick 3 out of 5 units for each mission, which range from a medic to a stealthy commando. Each unit type has strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities. The special abilities can be cool, with normal types like the medic's healing ability and the infantry's grenades to the commando's ability to sneak in buildings undetected and instantly kill enemy soldiers once he gets in range. Each mission will need different unit types, like an engineer or infantry to blow up tanks or a medic and some units with a lot of health for the longer missions, where survival is needed more than anything. Trying to select the right units for each mission can get fun, and adds a whole new layer of strategy. But most of the time each mission will need a unit with explosives, a medic, and another unit of choice depending on the mission. With the 3 units chosen and the short mission briefing concluded, you can finally start the mission. There is 1 unit in front with the 2 others following closely behind, but you can change that. By pressing an assigned button, you can call out to your allies to take cover or follow you. This might have been a cool feature if there were more orders, but the 2 orders aren't really needed and don’tt make the game any more tactical. You can use your special ability or fire 3-round shots at the enemies, but it can be hard to aim with only 8 directions and no strafe function and the controls are very stiff. Each mission ends by you walking in to a waving red flag, even though some mission objectives are to destroy tanks, which you don't even have to do most of the time. The missions get repetitive early on, with just you running for a flag while killing some enemies and blowing up a tank on the way. There are problems with the AI and team formations for both hostile and friendly units. Your squad always takes up 3 spaces, so many times you can get stuck when you walk into a thin hallway and try to turn around, forcing you to change units and move out from there. Your allies can walk into things trying to follow you, too. Because of trying to keep formation, when you move diagonally the formation gets deformed and your allies can get stuck again. Another problem with the formation is dropping a bomb with an engineer. You need to run away quickly, but if you turn around your allies will run behind you and- if you're not fast enough- get killed from the explosion. The enemies will sometimes run away to the top of the screen and run in place when they see you, leaving you to follow them until they hit a wall or some of their allies or to take them out with a sniper shot. While it may have been my type of phone (my game doesn't look at all like the Gamespot screenshots and I'm guessing a lot more is different), the graphics and sound are bad. Everything gets blurry when you take a step, and there's nothing graphically special ever going on. There aren't any water effects, so when you crawl the sewage it just covers have of your unit's body. The bullets are just orange little dots that slowly move towards the enemy. The sound is flat out horrible. Each shot it just odd, low-pitched beeps. The explosions also have the same effect, but a lower-pitched beep. There is no music other than the intro screen, which is hard to hear and doesn't sound very good. Despite all of these problems and flaws, Call of Duty is still a very fun squad-based Real Time Strategy game, and should please mobile gamers for a short while. It can be easy to jump into and you can play it just about any time, because winning or losing a mission takes a few mere minutes. Diehard Call of Duty fans may not like this, considering it is nothing like the PC version. For $5, it's not that bad.
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