Strange Ports: Call of Duty 3 for the Wii.

By Sam Coles:

You often find ports of games that are on consoles that are not quite powerful enough to replicate the experience. However for some reason I own Call of Duty 3 on the Wii, and it is Call of Duty 3 but on the Wii with no multiplayer, sup par graphics and controls that want me to throw my controller out the window.

The campaign of Call of Duty 3 on the Wii is exactly the same as the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions, with some missions cut due to the console limitations. You’ll take control of several soldiers from different fronts, such as the US, UK, Canada and Polish. It was fun playing through the campaign for the story as it is not the standard American or Soviet forces in the European front, you instead see the perspective of countries you don’t often see in World War II games. All the levels are there for the most part, but I do believe the polish tanker levels are cut due to hardware restrictions.

Let’s talk about the controls of this version; this was released on the launch of the Wii showcasing first person shooter controls. Oh boy can you tell this is an early first person shooter for the Wii, as the gimmicks are turned up to overdrive, plus it does not help the controls are terrible. How you shoot in this game is that you point your Wii remote at the screen in the vicinity of the enemy, it works sometimes, but someone thought it was a good idea to map the aim down sights button to A, which feels unnatural. This is fixed in later Call of Duty releases on the Wii, as they remapped it to Z which feels more natural.

Like I said before Call of Duty 3 was a launch title for the Wii, so you know what that means you have to waggle your Wii remote up and down like a teenager who has discovered the internet for the first time. Yes like the good versions of Call of Duty 3 you have the quick time event sequences, which are worse on the Wii as you have to waggle from side to side and most of the time it does not respond. Whoever developed the controls for the vehicle sections need to be sent to a special hell because they didn’t want to use the perfectly fine analogue stick, nope! Instead you have to steer the Wii remote and nun chuck in tandem, which spoiler alert it doesn’t work properly I found myself constantly driving into walls and doing full 180 spins.

Graphically the game does not look good, but that is to be expected as the Wii was more or less a GameCube hardware wise. The textures look blurry and bland with barely any detail when you’re walking across the open battlefields. Character models look okay, but the animations are terrible and their mouth movements flap up and down like Pac-man gorging on power pellets. Framerate wise it doesn’t run at the standard 60 frames per second like the 360 and PS3, as it targets 30 fps which it does hit for the most part, but it starts to dip in the really busy sections of the game and becomes unplayable.

Call of Duty 3 for the Wii is an interesting port, as it is Call of Duty 3 for the Wii but it is not the ideal way of playing it. I only own this game because it came for my Wii when I received it for my birthday 10 years ago, if you want to play Call of Duty 3 play it on the 360 or PS3.