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I arrived, chose my booth and started on the campaign mode of the game - beginning my hands-on. Now firstly we had to choose difficulty and one of the guys from Treyarch (you know, the developers of the game!) said that I shouldn’t do Veteran as it’s a lot more difficult. Of course I didn’t listen and started on Veteran. Thirty seconds later I was on Hard and then sixty seconds later I was on Normal. The Veteran on CoD2 is somewhere between Normal and Hard on CoD3. If you want to play through Call of Duty 3 on Veteran then be prepared to tear your hair out around every corner and scream with disgust as you are killed for the 348,828,983 time.

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Multiplayer Review

The Maps

The maps are gorgeous. They make CoD2 maps look like an Xbox1 game. Seriously. There's 9 maps and I have played about half of them. There actually is quite a bit of stuff you can jump on, but without climbing like you do in CoD2. I miss the climbing from CoD2 but it's okay.

On the Oil Fields map you have these warehouses with grated floors and there are up to 3 or 4 levels in it you can walk on. Then you can jump down from a walkway on to one of many pipes, duck, and you're pretty well hidden. It's good fun.

Other maps are just as fun but have their own unique flavors. There's tons of buildings to go into and each map is huge and has so many different obstacles, etc.

The Weapons

The weapons are great. I like the older CoD2 models better. For instance, the MP44 model is incredibly thin-looking. It looks like you've got a crowbar or something of that size out in front of you.

I haven't played with all weapons but I've tried quite a few. The bolt-action rifles take forever to reload. On reloading, the reloading animations really get in the way of your view. Much more than in CoD2.

Grenades

Frag grenades are great since we can prime them now. Sadly, they barely seem to do any damage at all unless the enemy is literally within 1 foot of it. I've even found myself surprised when I didn't get hurt from many grenades that would have killed me instantly in CoD2. Frag grenades seem to be a little "sticky" as opposed to CoD2. They hardly bounce around at all at times. Other times they'll hit a rafer and bounce back like a basketball!

Smoke grenades are just as effective as in CoD2. The smoke animation has more depth to it, but it spreads just as equally as in CoD2. One thing of notice is how the smoke grenades immediately start to smoke when they leave your hand whether you throw them right away or hold it back. They bounce around more when they land than they do in CoD2.

Shotguns are very weak. You will practically never kill someone with 1 shot right in front of you unless they are already hurt. Usually it took me 2 shots, but sometimes 3 at even within 10 foot range! That's terrible! Oh well, being a medic is still fun!

Special Abilities

I haven't used them all yet. For scouts, calling an airstrike literally takes forever. You have an artillary icon on your screen that slowly fills up, before you can call one in. I heard it was supposed to take 3 minutes to fill up, but I think it's more like 4 or 5 minutes. So no, scouts will NOT have an unfair advantage at all. I didn't get to call one in because I got too tired of waiting for the icon to fill up.

For the classes with mines, they work great. My only complaint is that it takes literally 5-6 very long seconds to set one in the ground. They can only be planted in dirt or grass, of course, and not indoors. Once you set them, you have a little popup icon with your team's flag above it to indicate to you that it's a friendly mine. The enemies don't see that popup icon, but instead have to really pay close attention to notice the top of it sticking out of the ground. It's very difficult to spot if you're the enemy. Hence, these are brutal to use against the enemy and work great! Be careful, they can also take out your teammates if they're too close.

For medics, reviving a dead teammate takes about 3 seconds of sticking them with the needle. Your needle icon bar fills up pretty quick.

I didn't try out any other special abilities.

Game Modes

Battle and Team Battle are just your standard spawn-anywhere deathmatch gametypes. Nothing new here.

Headquarters is quite different. Yes, you respawn when you have the HQ as we all know. It seems the HQ spawn points are a little more limited than in CoD2. I'll have to play it some more. Setting up HQ and shutting it down seem to take a little bit longer. The audio cues for setting up and destroying HQ are very low and subtle. You really got to pay attention to hear it.

CTF -- Didn't play yet.

War -- Quite fun. This will probably be my new favorite over CoD2's HQ. It is REALLY hard to take over a new flag-point since your team and the enemy both spawn so freakin' close to it when they die! In the matches I was in, these ppl overloaded one team and won War easilly by having way more players. Still fun, though.

Vehicles

Vehicles are fun! I really like just driving around in them. They are so fluid and smooth-riding. It's easy to get them into a sticky place, though, and I don't think there's a reverse for any of them.

I haven't rode in a tank yet.

Additional Info

- When you die and you want to call for a medic, just simply hit "B". You can only call out "Medic" once every 3 seconds or so. You can hear the enemy calling out, too, after you kill them if they press it! That's quite funny!

- Respawn times can be as low as 2 seconds or as high as 8 or 9 seconds. I haven't quite figured that out yet.

- When you die, you can sit there calling medic once every 3 seconds or after your counter is down to zero, you can push "A" to respawn. While waiting, you can also push "X" to view the classes screen again and choose another class if you like.

- There's no spectator mode whether you're dead or not. When you join a server, all you see is the pick a team screen then the classes screen. When you die, all you see is a camera about 10 feet away from you looking down on your dead body from an above angle. The camera is locked, so you can't move it nor can you spectate a teammate. That kind of bites.

- When you are killed, you instantly notice it because a special musical beat plays and your screen immediately goes to showing your dead body fly in the air until it hits the ground (in black & white). Even if you're standing and get killed you seem to fly through the air. Strange.

- An enemy and I both killed each other with gunfire. Don't ask me how, but that never happens in CoD2.

- There really is no lag. I have played with up to 16+ players so far and no lag at all.

- The framerate is a very steady 60 fps like CoD2.

- The audio is great but all weapons, explosions, etc. are nothing like in CoD2. The sniper rifle doesn't sound as powerful at all. No big deal.

- The post-game screen breaks down a TON of stuff. It shows all classes of your team, the enemy's team / it shows how many kills, deaths / you can also go to another screen for player-specific stats on yourself, etc / it shows a ton more -- too much to list here. VERY cool!!!

- When a round ends, everyone sees the post-game screen. There's a counter, too, that counts down the seconds until the next round.

- Whenever a map or game is loading or starting, you can talk to people with the headset! That's nice!

- Blades of grass don't get trampled like they do in single-player. :(

- When the host leaves, a new one is appointed instantenously. There's no pause in the action like in Halo 2 sometimes. I have no idea how to tell who's the host since the player screen doesn't say (at least I didn't notice it). Of course, there's some kind of special connection-sharing deal anyway so it's not like one person is 100% the host anyway.

- I don't know why, but it seems like I could put 10 rounds easilly into an enemy and they'd be alive still and kill me with 1 shot. This was very annoying. I still don't know why.

- Recoil is terrible! Much worse than CoD2 which wasn't too bad. This bums me out a little. Not only is it worse, but it gets in your view too much and you can't even see what's going on.

- The firearms I looked at give you over 100 rounds. This is more than enough in CoD3 since you're much more likely to die quickly than in CoD2. I never ran out of ammo once in my hours in CoD3. Not even close.

- You can pick up enemy weapons, of course. No, you don't change class at all.

- I noticed a bug with changing classes. I've seen a dead enemy on the ground where a different weapon pops out of air above him then falls down. I saw this happen 2-3x as he was apparantly switching classes and the game gave his dead body the weapon of that different class. This should be fixed!

- Running is great. You click in the left thumbstick and can run for about 4 seconds while holding it down. After another 4 seconds or so, you can click it in again. There doesn't appear to be any type of bar on the HUD to show you how much you have left. Oh well.

- In-game text on the screen to show who's killed who isn't as bad as some of the videos out there showed it. It's a lot smaller, about the same size as CoD2. The one real complaint I have with it so far is that headshots don't stand-out as well and you practically have to look for it.

- This game feels very different than CoD2. I can't say exactly how in the many ways but you'll know it when you play it. Is it still worth purchasing? YES. DEFINITELY! Personally I think I like the gameplay of CoD2 a little better. But CoD3 has such beatiful models, maps, textures, etc. Plus, the gameplay isn't "bad" at all. It's just quite a bit different than CoD2.

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