Call of Duty 3 Review - The black sheep of the series?

By Sam Coles:

Call of Duty 3 is regarded as the black sheep of the family and honestly I don’t know why people think that, considering Treyarch only had 8 months to make the game it is one of the best campaigns in the COD series. Call of Duty 3 was released in 2006 on the Xbox 360, Xbox, PS3, PS2 and Wii but curiously not on the PC.

Call of Duty 3 takes place during the European front in World War II where you swap between several different armies from an array of countries. You have the predictable US and British chapters, but it’s the Canadian and Polish chapters that are more interesting especially the Polish as you are part of a tank crew. They really emphasise the characters in this game as they are very likable and you tend to grow attached to them and it makes it all the more devastating when they die in battle. The voice acting is fantastic across the board from funny quips to arguments in your squad.

The gameplay is what you expect from a Call of Duty game where you point at things and you shoot at them and they tend to die, but they have added a few things to change the gameplay for better or worse. They’ve added in vehicle sections where you drive a jeep or a tank flattening everything in your way. A negative aspect of the gameplay are the quick time event fist fights you have with German soldiers, it’s not so bad on Xbox 360 but on PS3 and Wii you have to use motion controls to wrestle them off and it is not very fun. The gameplay in general is pretty solid although some of the single shot weapons can be questionable with their hit detection but overall great gameplay.

There is multiplayer but the servers are practically dead these days, but in its hay day you could have matches up to 24 players which it was weird when it came to Call of Duty as they only go up to 18 players and still do to this day. It would be great if they made more large scale COD games.

Visually the game looks great with great explosion effects and even the character models still look decent. The weapons are accurately modelled in the game from the classic M1 Garand and Thompson Machine Gun to the MP40. The sound effects are amazing with the terrifying chatter from the MP40 to the earth quaking thud of the grenades as they explode the attention to detail when it comes to the visuals and sound are amazing and it still holds up today.

Overall I don’t understand why people hate Call of Duty 3 it’s one of the best games in the series and one of the best World War II shooters of the period and considering they only had 8 months to make this game it is a true testament of creativity. The game is easy to find and you can play the 360 version on Xbox One via the backwards compatibility programme. You can get for a decent price but it’s not what I would call cheap for an old game from that period especially on 360 and PS3.