Brothers in Arms: Double Time
Missing in action.
The motion controls, usually the area where the lure of gimmickry proves many a game's undoing, are also mostly successful. Recalling your squad means raising the nunchuk and making a circular motion in the air. It's hardly essential, but it's the sort of stoic Hollywood-approved military signal that encourages you to get into the play fighting mood. Less successful are the melee attack and grenade throwing. Hitting an enemy with your weapon requires a horizontal bashing movement with the remote, while grenades are aimed by holding down the plus or minus button, and then thrown with a vertical flick.
It's not the accuracy or response that's the issue, just the inescapable problem of how these movements affect your view. Using your aiming device to carry out these attacks is like asking PC players to fling their mouse around, and when throwing a grenade leaves you staring at the sky you know something isn't quite working. But motion control can be switched off for grenades, and the sensitivity of the remote can also be tweaked, so while it's an annoyance it's still far from the clumsy and unintuitive waggling that Call of Duty 3 demanded.
No, what ultimately lets Brothers in Arms down is a game engine that only ever manages mediocre performance, and is often shockingly poor. The frame rate is low, with frequent inexplicable pauses and stutters, while levels are linear, little more than a procession of claustrophobic pathways punctuated by scripted encounters. The enemy AI, in particular, leaves a lot to be desired. One memorable moment found me discovering a trio of German soldiers sitting at a table in a farmhouse. Apparently oblivious to the American soldier in the doorway, they even failed to react when I shot one of them dead. I then tossed a grenade into the room, which killed another but still wasn't enough to rouse the final enemy from his important sitting down duties, so I shot him as well. No wonder they lost.
That's an extreme example, but you really have to ramp the difficulty all the way up to get enemies that even begin to provide a credible challenge, and it's at those unforgiving difficulty levels where the limits of the floaty aiming become a hindrance. Things certainly aren't helped by some horribly inconsistent hit detection. Headshots are no guarantee of a kill, while enemies will often take two or three bullets to the chest without even reacting. The complete absence of multiplayer is another black mark against its name, especially when Call of Duty 3 showed that it's far from impossible on the Wii, with a little effort.
You're left with a frustrating package. There's a wealth of gameplay, across the two discs, but very little variety. When you've seen one empty field or chunky polygon village you've seen them all, and enemy encounters soon settle into a predictable suppress-flank-kill routine that robs the game of all its tension. In terms of control there's a lot here that comes close to finding a workable solution for the FPS genre on the Wii, but it's undermined by the undeniable fact that it's all in service of a technically sloppy game.