Call of Duty 3

I never had any real desire to play this game aside from the fact that I've played so many other Call of Duty games. But I managed to beat the entire thing in one Friday night and one Saturday morning, so at least I didn't have to devote a ton of time to it. I've said this before, and so has fellow Call of Duty enthusiast Sweeney, but when you play so many of these games they all kind of start to blur together in memory. The reason for that is that they're all so damn identical to one another. Enter the trenches; clear out three buildings; snipe the mortar teams; navigate the tank through the villages. So many of these World War II combat staples have just worn out their welcome for me, I guess. They were at least somewhat "new" in the first Call of Duty game, and in World at War they were done with an excellent sort of fervor and excitement. Here? Meh. I'd actually go as far as to say that this was the least fun I've ever had with a Call of Duty game to date. The aforementioned original one was certainly clunkier and shittier overall, but that at least had the charm of being the first of many, like the Zelda and Mario and Mega Man games from the 1980s. When this 2006 game got slow or buggy, I just felt kind of frustrated. There's no reason for an NPC to be standing in the center of the doorway I need to go through while yelling at me that we need to go through the doorway. There's no reason I should have to backtrack a hundred yards to run through the general area that will toggle my teammates to realize that we need to advance a hundred yards... to where I had been waiting for them in the first place. There were a few new aspects introduced here, like driving a Jeep around under heavy fire, or QTE hand-to-hand combat gimmicks, but the game ultimately felt much more poorly and clumsily made than it should have. I didn't hate Call of Duty 3, but after playing its excellent sequels and its non-terrible predecessors, I was definitely disappointed by the offering overall.