Call of Duty 3 Review

Once again I returned to the WWII battlefield... and a few months ago I got sick of playing any more WWII FPS...

I know it's an old game. Very ancient to be honest. Now they have Call of Duty 4: World at War and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. But I decided to finish the 3rd installment off because it's the last WWII FPS game I have in my arsenal that I have yet to complete.

I've played the Medal of Honor series (MoH, MoH: Underground, MoH: Allied Assault, MoH: Rising Sun), Call of Duty series (CoD: Finest Hour, CoD 2, CoD: Big Red One, CoD 3), Battlefield series (1942). Those are all the WWII first person shooters I can recall. So somewhere in 2007 I experienced my 3rd gamer life crisis because I got sick of playing the same thing (just graphics improvement in each games) and I put down my dual-shock analog controllers, for the next few years.

Then this week I dusted off ye olde PS2 and dug my dusty arsenal. Played this one up, and finished it in 6 hours. Surprisingly, CoD3 made me fall in love with WWII FPS all over again. Obviously the graphics is the main bonus. The plot from the lives of the American and Commonwealth soldiers later spiced things up. Although button combo mashing mini game is generic nowadays (thanks to God of War influence), it sure made the game stood out. Examples include simple L2 R2 mashing when going melee with a German infantry, rotating the L3 button to screw in the fuse of a bomb on the King Tiger tank, or rowing the paddle of a boat.

And then there's the squad bonding that plays in well. Despite playing with different faction in each missions intervally, you will cease to forget the squad members that fight alongside you from the beginning to the bloody end. The conflict, the hate, the swearing, the cussing and the rage when one of them get shot in the head. I can't recall when was the last time I went into a rage and blasted every single Nazi infantry on the streets of Europe after my lads went down. "SHIT! DIXXXXXXXX!!!!!!!! NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!" *cry cry sob, shoot shoot shoot*

Owh and then there's the epic real battlefield tension. The last time I actually felt real fear and stress was in Conflict Vietnam and Shellshock Nam '67 which left me exhausted after end game (and all I did was sitting there staring at TV and mashing the controllers). Defending the hills with fellow Polish army only to be slaughtered was terrifying, and being pushed back to the hill top was stressful and depressing moments. Then with a handful Polish comrades left, the German infantry pushed on with their fearsome battle cry that gave me goose bumps. And the sight of another 2 Panzer tanks behind them make me wanna write a goodbye letter to family in Poland.

Seconds later, green smoke were seen at the base of the hill. The Canadians reinforcements have arrived. We exulted as the Nazi forces retreated. But comrade Lucky was dead beside me. Epic.

Reliving the WWII experience was worth 6 hours of my life