Enhanced to the max
At a recent press event in London we were totally spoilt for choice with the games on offer. While we spent some time with the likes of Need for Speed Carbon and Pro Evolution Soccer 6 we were really there to see the two big shooters of the year in action, Gears of War and Call of Duty 3. If you've been reading HEXUS.gaming you'll already know our feelings on Gears of War, but Call Of Duty 3 has also left us purring with delight.
Call of Duty 3 delivers the intensity of being closer than ever to the fury of combat during the Normandy Breakout, the historic campaign that made the liberation of Paris possible and brought the Allies a step closer to Berlin. Players assume the roles of four ordinary Allied soldiers—American, British, Canadian and Polish—and are thrust onto an authentic, living battlefield for an unprecedented variety of combat, with advanced high-definition graphics, detailed character animations and explosive on-screen action, delivering the most immersive and cinematically intense war experience ever.
Click for larger imageFrom the smoke clouds created by the thunderous explosions right down to the debris that litters the war-torn streets, the realism of the Call of Duty series has taken a further shift in the right direction. In Call of Duty 3 every small detail appears to have been grasped and re-created more accurately than any war game. The closest I've seen to this sort of realism was in Ubisoft's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, but Call of Duty 3 manages to further capture the intensity of war, and during the time I spent with the game, I was embarrassingly ducking and weaving to avoid gun-fire as if the bullets were going to project out of the sceen and pierce through my heart or a grenade was going to land on my lap and send me up to heaven in cloud of virtual smoke. This level of realism is achieved in many different ways, partly due to the pace of the game, some rambunctious audio effects, meticulous graphics and the way the intense gameplay shifts up and down and gear drawing you into the game world.
At one point I was knelt down behind some debris pummelling the enemy with gun-fire when half a dozen or so Germans broke their cover and darted towards me, I fumbled with the controller before I switched to a grenade and threw it toward the advancing soldiers. On that occasion I managed to take three of them down as their bodies flew left right and centre in an pulsating explosion that demonstrated the improved physics, booming audio and detailed graphics of Activision's latest first person shooter.
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