Tuesday, December 05, 2006

A step back

So I finally got to play Call of Duty 3 today. I'm a little annoyed by the whole affair. It looks better, but only just. There are some major improvements, such as facial detail and animation, and texture quality is a fair bit higher. But there are also some things that have been poorly implemented. The depth of field effect you get when you aim is good, but can be pretty damn annoying when the game decides you're focusing on something other than the mean ol' man in front of you. It's chaotic enough without unfinished graphical effects making life harder for you.

There are more cut scenes. A lot more. There a lot of very clumsily scripted parts, to be honest. Least favourite so far: spotting targets for a tank. Just clumsy, and fairly pointless.

I knew things weren't going to go well when I had to restart the very first checkpoint because of a game-breaking bug (couldn't use melee attack, and so couldn't complete the tutorial). In the hour or so that I've played, I've repeatedly been stuck on the scenery, and had to restart.

There's a lot to like in the game, and I think it will be a very good game, when it's finished. But we're a few updates away from that yet. Let PC gamers play broken games. For a console, how about just waiting until it works?

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