Call of Duty 3

What rankles even more is that some of the so-called 'new' elements introduced to Call of Duty 3 are so flimsy it's hard to believe that a developer as talented as Treyarch thought they improved the game in any way. The supposedly intense Close Quarters Combat sequences that pop up four or five times during the game are, frankly, a pathetic waste of time. Now and then the game dictates that a German solider will get the jump on you in a fight to the death. The screen switches to a close up view of their gurning face, and you're tasked with fending them off by hammering the left and right triggers (a rubbish idea in Fahrenheit, and no better here). Eventually, you'll have to press the indicated button when it flashes up to finish them off - the only bonus about the whole affair is that it doesn't occur very often.

Elsewhere, the game throws in some equally pointlessly unchallenging sequences where you have to use your binoculars to mark targets (click left stick to go into zoomed-in binocular view, move cursor a few degrees left or right, press X, boom), and tries to make the bomb-planting sequences more interesting by turning them into a Simon Says-style sequence where you have to press the buttons in the directed order, rotate the stick, touch your toes and wiggle your ears. The sections where you drive a tank feel nicely bombastic, but, again, it's hard to fail, and feel more like interactive cut-scenes than a life-or-death part of the war effort. Equally half-baked are the occasional driving sections where you board a jeep and marvel at how much it feels like you're driving a hovercraft through the set of Telly Tubbies. Unfortunately there's no sign of Tinky Winky.

Stuck in a rut

Normally, it'd be easy to overlook some of the more undercooked elements, but then some of the technical deficiencies start to prove irksome. For example, on more than one occasion you'll find yourself inexplicable stuck in the scenery and unable to get out. Fair enough. Restart checkpoint. But then you'll come across times when the AI itself gets stuck, and as a result events don't trigger the scripted events that move things on. Grr. Restart checkpoint.

Other things also strike you as strange - muzzle flash showing up through solid walls, dead enemies stuck mid air in scenery, the occasional appallingly textured area, some dreadful lighting bugs where soldiers are either inexplicably brightly lit, or too dark to see their faces. And then there's the clunky-looking animation transitions where you see men literally flicking between stances, and even, shock, some pop up (though admittedly that's on one small section in the whole game). It's the lack of attention to detail that take you out of the moment, that shatter the suspension of disbelief, that remind you that the game engine's already horribly dated in places that matter, and you have to wonder how significant the game's parallel development on PS2 and Xbox had on the so-called next-gen versions.

Lean on me

Instead of being involved in a tense battle for survival, you're wondering where the five extra allied soldiers just came from, and how many times they're just going to wander straight into the firing line of that machine gun nest. Even the generally slick controls have the capacity to annoy, by mapping the binoculars to a click on the left stick, you're forever accidentally getting it out just as you're trying to flee imminent danger. You'd also think that in a game that's mostly based on making good use of cover that you'd at the very least be able to lean out from behind a wall, column or doorway by now. Yeah, we know the CoD games have always been like this, but why should we put up with being given the same old creaking controls and gameplay mechanics and just 'cos? GRAW and Gears of War have shaken up some of the old school convention, so why can't this? It's easily on an equal footing as one of the biggest, most anticipated games of the entire year. And yet we're supposed to be happy to part with the cash for something that feels like a marked step back in the current climate?

As with last year's version, Treyarch has come up with the latest game to adopt the rather controversial recharging health system. Now, while this definitely makes it a less frustrating game, and removes the need to litter the battlefield with medikits, it also reduces the challenge to almost zero. Played on Easy or Normal, you'll whomp through the game in about six or seven hours without breaking sweat. To try and spice things up and to see whether it made the game more challenging and tense, and to see if the game's AI gets any better, I played a fair chunk on Veteran level. Supposedly the AI is tougher, more uncompromising and a better shot, but the real difference is that they react slightly quicker, nothing more - the main difference is your ability to take shots is massively reduced so you'll merely be taking two or three times as long to inch your way through each level, mentally logging all those surprise moments that catch you out first time around and reloading certain checkpoints repeatedly. But after a combined total of about 15 hours playing the single-player campaign, the thing that really jumps out at you is how old the core battlefield/house-clearing combat feels.

After playing something like FEAR, you'd think Treyarch would maybe consider applying an approximation of Monolith's exciting 'hunt you down from all sides and exploit your weaknesses' ethos, but it does nothing of the sort. It's the same old story with the AI in CoD3. The enemy has precisely two behaviour modes: the 'sit behind cover and pop out now and again' mode or the demented 'rush towards you like a bunch of lemmings' AI that's been in place forever - and that applies both inside and outside. For all the amazing feats that Treyarch pulls off with regard to creating environments that look incredible at first glance, it doesn't take long to see beyond that, especially when it's shattered by the dense behaviour of the AI on both sides throughout. Until Infinity Ward (and Treyarch, presumably) gets around to fixing that side of the game (hopefully) next time around, what you're left with is an obliging enemy that only flanks if the game scripts it that way, and clueless squad mates that happily run into a hail of bullets and often have trouble dealing with enemies standing right in front of them. If all of this is the definition of top class next generation entertainment, then clearly we've got spectacularly low standards and the ability to forgive a multitude of gaming sins when they're glaringly apparent in front of our eyes.