Call of Duty 3 [Wii]

After playing Red Steel, you might conclude that the Wii isn't well suited to do a shooter. But Call of Duty 3 proves otherwise. Although it's far from spectacular, Activision's World War II title is the game of choice for a bit of Wii gunplay.

Red Steel took more of a light gun approach, using the Wiimote as a pointer to aim at targets on a relatively static screen. Moving your perspective around was a sluggish proposition that involved pushing your pointer towards the edges of the screen. But Call of Duty 3 takes a much more conventional approach, whipping your view around much more readily. It assumes you'll want your target in the center of the screen and adjusts your perspective accordingly. When you move the pointer off-center, you start to turn much sooner than you would in Red Steel. This makes it easier to move around and keep an eye out for enemies.

It also helps that Call of Duty 3 uses a radar display that shows the position of sighted enemies with a red dot. Furthermore, most firefights are built so that the enemies are concentrated in one direction, with you moving as a front along with your squad. And the fact that you have a squad also helps the controls quite a bit. In a game like Red Steel, all the bad guys are shooting at you, and you alone. In Call of Duty 3, you're one of many targets. Indeed, sometimes, you're a little more than a bystander to a hail of bullets going in all directions...but it's much easier to work with the controls when you have other guys nearby to help soak up the bullets.

The adaptation to the Wii lends itself to some really amusing mini-game interfaces, from scripted mano a mano struggling with Nazis to rowing boats. In a few instances, the Wii interface feels sloppy. The drift when using the sniper rifle is so hard to control that sniping might as well be obsolete. The driving sequences are as horrible as ever, particularly with the silly "invisible steering wheel" interface: hold the Wiimote and nunchuk and 9 o' clock and 3 o' clock, and steer.

Also, it's odd that the grenade buttons are reversed from the indicator on the screen. On both the PS3 and 360, the frag and smoke grenade buttons correspond to their positions on the interface. Throwing grenades with the nunchuk is an unnecessary gimmick that doesn't justify the extra busywork; there's probably a reason this is turned off by default. Finally, there's something counterintuitive about flicking the nunchuk up to reload; flicking it down, as if to discard a spent magazine, feels much more natural. At least there's one thing Red Steel does better.

Call of Duty 3 looked pretty chintzy even on next-generation systems and it's easy to see why when you play it on the Wii. Everything the developers rendered had to be possible on a Wii (and Playstation 2, for that matter). The graphics in the Wii version are busy, murky, and sometime downright awful. It can be hard distinguish good guys from bad guys, not to mention making out where you're supposed to shoot during the longer range firefights. This isn't the game to show off the Wii's graphics.

One of the biggest drawbacks with this version is the lack of any multiplayer support. Not only is online multiplayer the strongest feature in this sequel, but it's the only claim it has to replayability. On the Wii, once you've run through the story once, there's no incentive for it to do anything but gather dust on your shelf. It's a decent enough game as far as run-of-the-mill World War II action goes, but beyond proving that the Wii's controls can handle first person shooters, it doesn't hold up as anything but yet another middling World War II shooter.