Call of Duty 3 Member Review for the Wii

Do you hate Nazi's? Does the idea of being yelled at in 1940's slang just make you happier than anything else in the world? Do you hear the sound of M1 Garand bullets in your sleep? Well, somebody on a development team somewhere must have heard your call, because they designed Call of Duty 3 just for you. However, for your average gamers, you might want to read on.

Call of Duty 3 is the latest game in one of the best loved WWII shooters. It has you playing soldiers from several different nations against the Nazi threat. Now, this is the first real shooter for the Wii, and as such it is the test by fire for most users of the idea of using the Wii as a machine for first person shooters. So how does it fair? Well, don't throw out your Xbox yet...

The Wii controller does a good job of allowing you to use your rifle for accurate and precise aiming. However, you never stop aiming. In the beginning, this can be difficult to even comprehend as the first battle develops and you are barely holding your own. When I say holding your own, I mean barely killing half the enemies on screen.

That's right, this game is easy. While I understand a developers hesitating to notch the difficulty level up on a new machine with a new way of controlling your character, that is not excuse for this game. You can go through this entire game without dying once. I bought this game and played through it in a long Sunday session without dying a single time, and I am not an amazing gamer. The difficulty level is not the only problem though.

I understand the Wii is not supposed to be the graphical powerhouse of the other systems. That being said, this game looks lame. Its playable, but to say its more than that, especially for next-generation gaming is being nice. One scene has your team-mates leaning over you and speaking to you with no motion on their faces at all. Thats a show-stopper in terms of a demonstration of graphical power, and is far from the only example of that kind of problem.

If you can look past all of that though, you are looking at a solid game. I wish this game had multiplayer of any sort, along with the complaints listed above. However, at the end of the day this is a game that will allow you to have some fun and relive World War II. It also shows that the Wii does best when the games designed for it are done with the Wii in mind from the beginning, not just a port of a PC game. I would recommend this as a rental, especially due to the Wii's lean offerings at the moment. However, as more developed shooters come along, I would suggest placing this game on the shelf and using it as an example of how launch games can provide fun without actually giving you what you hoped for.