Call of Duty 3 (PlayStation 3)

World War II may have ended in 1945, but that hasn't stopped the axis and allies from waging war against one another on the video game front. And now there's a new battleground--the PlayStation 3. With Call of Duty 2 developer Infinity Ward having moved on to other projects, the series has been placed in the hands of Treyarch, the developer behind Call of Duty 2: Big Red One. It did not disappoint. Call of Duty 3 on the PlayStation 3 is a great game with thoroughly enjoyable multiplayer, quality presentation, and some mildly-interesting tilt-control support. It is missing a couple of features that its Xbox 360 counterpart contains, and the frame rate is far less reliable in this version, but the overall intensity and playability of Call of Duty 3 remains intact, despite these few issues.

There's never a dull moment in Call of Duty 3.

Call of Duty 3 takes place in 1944 during the Normandy Breakout. After landing successfully on the beaches of France, the allied focus was on getting the Germans out of France and liberating Paris, which was under Nazi control at the time. As was the case in the last game, you're placed in the role of several different soldiers and you'll participate in campaigns for America, Britain, Canada, and Poland. Each country's campaign has a unique storyline that is supposed to get you emotionally involved with the characters, but the stories aren't very interesting; there's a soldier with a strong distaste for the French, an overbearing sergeant, and a young radio operator who has been labeled a coward. Though the stories aren't particularly engaging, fighting for four different armies works because it gives you a sense of not only how much effort it took to wrestle control of France from the Germans, but also that it wasn't just the United States that lost men and women in World War II.

The game opens with a brief training mission. Here, you'll learn how to fire weapons and throw grenades, as well as how to move around. The controls offer a lot of variety, yet they're still easy to learn. You can fire your weapon with R1, but this doesn't allow for much accuracy. For precision aiming, you'll want to press L1, which raises your gun to eye level and lets you use the weapon's sight. Here, you're vulnerable during the time it takes to raise your weapon and while you wait for the blurring effect that simulates your eyes focusing to clear up. It's a subtle effect, but it works really well and it's not overdone. You can also perform a melee attack by pressing the right analog stick or by rotating the controller 90 degrees. Clicking the left analog stick brings up your binoculars--an unfortunate button-mapping choice because it's far too easy to accidentally push the stick down when you're scrambling for your life. You can toss smoke grenades to create cover and frag grenades to clear large groups of Wehrmacht. Call of Duty 3 also lets you scoop up grenades thrown by the enemy and toss them back. To prevent your grenades from being returned to sender, you can "cook" a grenade by pressing and holding R2, which lets the grenade get closer to detonating before you throw it. This is an important technique to master--not only because it's useful, but also because screwing it up results in a grenade exploding in your hands. Because there's no health bar in the game, you'll need to watch the screen when you're getting hit. As you get shot, the edges of the screen turn crimson and close in around you the more you get hit. Should you fall victim to a grenade or a bullet and not die, all you have to do is seek shelter to recover your health.

Close-quarters combat is a new, albeit uninteresting, addition to the series.

After your training is complete, you hop in the back of a truck and ride into battle. When you get out of the truck, or rather are blown out of the truck by an explosion, you're boosted over the cemetery wall. Here, you'll find yourself in the midst of one of the most impressive firefights in any first-person shooter to date. Everywhere you look, there's carnage. Bullets and grenades whiz through the air while bombs explode all around, leaving soldiers to scramble for whatever cover they can find--be it a bombed-out mausoleum or a grave stone. The bodies of your fallen comrades are strewn about the battlefield--a stark reminder that unless you want to join them, you need to keep moving. A later level sees you making your way across a pasture using a tank (and even the carcasses of dead cows) as cover to shield yourself from the Nazi soldiers who surround the field. Most of the rest of the game's 14 missions aren't quite as intense as these two examples, but there's rarely a dull moment to be found.

Call of Duty 3 isn't a run-and-gun FPS, but it's not as slow-paced as a tactical shooter, either. You'll fight alongside CPU-controlled soldiers, and you'll generally need to stay behind cover, pick off as many soldiers as you can, and then advance to the next safe location. Since you spend so much time behind cover, it would have been nice to have the ability to lean, but you can do pretty well without it. Because the game's artificial intelligence appears "smarter" than a typical FPS, it can be frustrating to be unable to clear a particular section because of cheap tricks like how new enemies will spawn to replace fallen soldiers in outdoor levels (they don't do this indoors). But once you come to grips with the fact that you can't kill them all, it shouldn't bother you much. You still need to be careful not to shoot fellow soldiers, but the game is forgiving--you're not forced to restart when you fire that first bullet into your comrade's chest. Call of Duty 3 isn't a terribly difficult game on the default setting, nor is it particularly lengthy, clocking in at 8 to 10 hours from start to finish. On the default difficulty, enemy soldiers aren't very aggressive and they'll follow the same patterns over and over, so it's easy to sit back and wait for them to show themselves. Series veterans looking for more of a challenge will want to bump up the difficulty to hard or veteran, as doing so results in a vastly different and more intense experience. Enemies are much more aggressive, they're better shots, and your health disappears much quicker.

If you're not blowing something up, you're doing something wrong.

Mission objectives are varied but don't stray far from what you'd expect from the type of first-person shooter that takes place in World War II. Sometimes you'll simply need to get from point A to point B, while other times you'll need to defend an area from attack, rescue hostages, or plant explosives. You'll also have to use your binoculars to mark targets for air strikes, man stationary guns, and even ride in the back of a jeep and pick off bad guys with the jeep's machine gun. A couple of other scenarios have you behind the controls of a tank and you'll need to eliminate enemy tanks and armored vehicles. The tanks are unwieldy at first, but once you get the hang of them, it's a blast driving around and blowing stuff up. Rather than a single path to success, there are multiple ways to approach missions. Sometimes the game presents you with clear-cut options, while other times you'll have to find them on your own. Each objective is shown as a star on your radar, making them easy to find even in the heat of battle.

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