Duty Called

I played some COD3 last night for the first time. I only played through the training and first mission before going online to try out some MP. The campaign felt comfortably familiar. There are a few new twists to the controls but everything is basically the same scheme as COD2.

One of the first things I noticed was that there is a much more chaotic pace to the game then what I remember from COD2. I played on the normal difficulty to start with just so I could get a feel for what to expect without dying every 2 seconds. Let me just say this. The action is so frantic and ferocious that I can’t imagine I’d ever want to attempt this on Veteran difficulty. At one point I wanted to just find a fox hole and cower for a while. (I would not be good in actual combat ;) ).

The graphics are certainly upgraded from COD2 but it would have been nice to see a more realistic facial movement from my Sergeant and fellow soldiers. If it wasn’t for the fact that my squad was facing one person I wouldn’t have been able to tell who was speaking. As far as the rest of the game play goes, if you’ve played COD2 you’ll pick up on this very easily. They still use the gold star system on your compass to tell you where you’re supposed to go next, and as I said before all the controls are essentially the same as COD2. One thing that is new control wise is the ability to “cook” your grenades. By holding the RB you can watch a counter tick down the time before the grenade will explode, then time your throw accordingly. Pretty handy since they still use the grenade indicator to let you know where the nearest ‘nades are at.

Next I went into MP. I only had a few people on my FL that were playing at the time but we managed to put together a small (5-6) room of folks together to check out some of the maps anyway. Tait had already started a room so I jumped in with him and Netw3rk to explore my new surroundings. The first thing that I noticed was Netw3rk was already killing me way too easily. DAMN YOU NETW3RK!! (j/k :lol:) The next thing was how big the maps are. We strolled and drove through probably a half dozen or so of the maps and from what I can tell every one of them was at least twice as big as anything from COD2. Depending on the map you choose and the game type you play expect to see tanks, motorcycles, and the WWII equivalent of the Warthog.

Here is where the game falls apart a little in my book. We wanted to set up a new game to try out since we had started with a team based game and weren’t able to chat together as we explored/killed each other. I decided to set one up and backed out of the current room. THERE IS NO PREGAME LOBBY! What idiot at Activision or whoever the hell is responsible for making that game overlooked that important piece of the MP puzzle? I had to go into my game options, select the map and game I wanted, choose the “modifiers” I thought were appropriate and start the game. Only then could I send out invites to my friends to get them in the game. I mean really. If I had 18 people to get invites out to by the time I finished the last one 2 flags may have been captured by then.

After the game is over the game at least keeps everyone in a post game lobby where you can view some stats and (here’s is one cool idea) vote for what game type and map you’d like to play next. One problem however, you get all of 20 seconds to make those decisions. Why can’t the host simply push a start button or at least start a count down in the post game lobby? Heaven forbid someone needs to take a bio break or actually review the stats on the page. I found myself barely able to even get my 2 votes entered before the timer ran out.

I did notice that there are many modifiers available to be used in set up. One important one to be sure to not overlook is the time limit. If I remember right the default time I had on the first match was 60 minutes! Also there were 2-3 maps that would only hold 12 players so some one is going to have to be aware of the current head count so that invite don’t go out when the map chosen isn’t big enough. The game does seem to be geared toward massive battles, presumably with people coming and going throughout a match. Getting 24 clan mates/site mates in one huge battle will be great fun once more people turn their attention from GoW and are ready to give this title a try. Hopefully the lobby issues can be resolved.

Overall I wasn’t as wowed by COD3 as I was by GoW, at least not based on the first 1-2 hours I played in each. Over time my opinion on both games will probably evolve I just wanted to share my first impressions. COD3 seems like a prettier, larger scale version of COD2. That’s not to say that’s a bad thing, just not as dramatic a shift in game play as GoW was the night before. So as of now I’m giving the game a 7.6 out of 10. Don’t ask me how I get to a .6, it wasn’t quite an 8 but not bad enough to be any lower than 7.5 :)


Forgive the longwinded write up, I’m stuck on a plane with nothing to do for 2 hours.