Call of Duty 3 [X360]

They used to call it 'formula'. You'd go to the movies and the second-run feature might be a war flick where, within five minutes, you could predict exactly what was going to go down. Not that it wasn't entertaining, but it was a passive sort of entertainment, while waiting for the main event.

Until now, Call of Duty has been the main event. The first two games are huge, immersive, loud and tough. You couldn't think about anything other than staying alive while playing. So what makes Call of Duty 3, which has many of the same features and an identical gameplay style, feel so different? Is it the change in developer (previously Infinity Ward, this time Treyarch) or is the formula just too familiar to work?

Much as in the other two games, the single player game traces a line through history, here following several different nations (America, the UK, Poland and Canada) as they strive to push German forces out of France. This game isn't as good at helping you identify with unique soldiers on each side; while we knew that we were supposed to be playing specific characters, the cutscenes and plotlines are not as well drawn. The dialogue is stock, and the voice acting equally baseline. Where soldier-written letters once graced loading screens, helping draw us into the game, we're now left with less information and less immersion.

That leaves the gameplay to pick up the slack, and it's not much better equipped. As before, the action can be intense, but despite an attempt to present branching pathways and varied, user-selected objectives, this chapter feels more linear than before. Rather than being pulled into each level, we felt pushed into the action, as if there was only one thing to do at any time.

Where the last two games created the sense that the war was happening around you all the time, this is more like The Truman Show -- it's easy to feel that everyone, friend and foe, is just waiting for you to come around the corner before getting their war on. So you'll emerge from cover to find an ally and enemy facing each other point blank, but not really shooting, or if they are, not hitting each other.

That's not to say that nothing in the game is able to impress. The Forest is an excellent chapter, with a better rendition of a middle European forest than we've seen anywhere else. There are other moments that approach the intensity of the previous two games, but each one seems to come right at the end of a chapter, so that just as you're really getting keyed up the action comes to a halt.

And while we applaud Treyarch's attempt to add variety to the action with tanks and jeeps for us to drive, these sequences feel tacked on rather than integral. Driving a jeep, in particular, feels quite artificial, especially if you push the camera back to a third-person view -- then the bouncing vehicle looks ported from a much less advanced game. And the new mini-games, like where you'll perform a few button and analog stick tasks to set a demolition charge, are generally a great idea. But there's no sense of urgency or the potential for failure. And the button-mashing melee confrontations peppered throughout the game (all pre-set) simply feel intrusive.

Despite a few dodgy-looking moments, however, the visual presentation is praiseworthy. The sensation of navigating expansive, violently scarred landscape remains impressive. The smoke and explosions in particular are wonderful, and we found ourselves using smoke grenades all the time, simply because it was so much fun to dash through the white and grey clouds after elusive enemies.

It's hard not to love other details, like the way the depth of field adjusts as you sight down the barrel of a Lee-Enfield rifle, or the way you can fire that rifle at a Nazi behind a sectioned window, blowing out only one pane of glass as the bullet travels.

But there are moments of pop up and weird collision failure that we don't remember being so obvious before. More than once we blew up an 88 gun emplacement, only to see one of the gun's shells just hanging in midair next to the rubble. Other similar graphical red flags cropped up, each serving to pull us right out of the action. Ambition is good, but COD3's ambition occasionally exceeds Treyarch's reach.

There are also a handful of basic presentation/behavior gripes. Cutscenes can't be skipped, so you'll have to watch the same scenes over and over again if you quit and restart. And the game is very dark by default; we had to bump up the brightness to see detail. But the save refuses to stick, so we'd load a save, watch the unskippable cutscene, realize that the brightness had to be reset and then have to sit through the cutscene again, all before playing. How's that for immersive? We were immersed in irritation, anyway.

Despite the problems with the offline game, we were thrilled to find that the game comes alive online. Suddenly the maps are expansive, and festooned with enough cover that not only do human opponents easily outdo the AI, they invite a variety of play styles, depending on the map and game type. Our experiences ranged from all-out chaos and ferocity to slowly measured assaults during capture the flag and objective-oriented team games.

But as intrinsic as the online play may be to the Xbox as a platform, there's no question that most players get their feet wet in offline play, and COD3 isn't strong enough there. The series has so far evinced a wonderful balance of immersive play in both arenas, and that balance has been knocked way out of whack this time. There may be a lot of chaos on the battlefield, but now it just feels like noise, not excitement.