Intro
Well my brother bought this when I first got the Wii and he played it for about 10 minutes before giving up. I was playing Red Steel at the time, once I finished I moved onto Zelda. I avoided it at first because of the slating my brother gave it but it’s actually very good! The reason why he hated it was it that this was his first experience with the Wii, he’d barely even touched WiiSports before it - and for someone who’s addicted to Call Of Duty (COD) 1 for the PC, he was disappointed that he couldn’t control it.

It’s a difficult game to get used to, but my experience with Red Steel was really useful even if it was just to get used to moving in a three dimensional virtual world using the remote for orientation.

Graphics & Audio
Now this is an awesome looking game. It beats the Hell out of COD1 on my PC and at all times looks stunning. There’s many different NPC models and they all look great and very realistic.

If anything the game is very dark and grimy to create a realistic environment - lots of smoke, craters, bomb remnants - it looks disastrous but that’s the point. This can create problems with light though, sometimes everything was too dark to actually see the enemy - especially with light from other sources in the room reflecting on the television. I had to play most of the game in a dark room to see anything (and yes my tv is set up properly ).

But when you break out of the destroyed cities and towns the lush green fields of the country look great and chapters set in forests are really detailed.

The title sounds great too. Lots of explosions, thundering cannon fire, stereo gunshots - it’s got it all. I suppose the trouble is though that the voice acting, although done well again, was often drowned out by gunfire. Now again this is realistic of what war is - LOUD - but it does sometimes affect the gameplay. This is where the objective screen comes in handy so if you miss an instruction and if it’s important it’ll be there for you to recap.

Gameplay
Now the game itself is divided into chapters, each one is basically a huge environment. Cities, towns, farms, mansions - it’s got all of your basic war locations. Nothing really new but it’s not like developers can rewrite history to improve gameplay.

Anyways, it’s your basic FPS. You point and shoot, but what makes it different is there really is a huge sense of team dependency. If you try and storm that machine gun turret you’re going to die. And that’s a fact. You’ve got to look for cover, watch your team mates and give your support.

The AI they use is pretty good, they sometimes have the habit of running in front of you and then standing in a doorway so you can’t go through but they generally have a good basic intelligence.

The enemy AI is somewhat more stupid, at least on the easy setting I chose , and often just stand in front of your troops waiting to die. But there is some realism in the fact that they often retreat and regroup when your own team force forwards and if you fall back they’ll take up the space and even run for cover.

There really aren’t that many weapons though for a COD game, maybe there’s slightly more or less I can’t remember, but nothing really stands out. Again this may be a sacrifice of gameplay for realism and historical accuracy. Chances are if you kill a Nazi they’re carrying an MP40 or a Kark rifle or whatever they’re called. But there’s still enough variety to keep the game going although with two spaces for guns it’s easy to deal with any strategical situation - use a rifle for distance and accuracy and an automatic gun for close quarters and fierce fighting.

Grenades are handy and the physics used are perfect, and it’s hilarious picking up enemy grenades and just throwing them back at the guys who just lobbed ‘em.

Controls
Just your bog-standard FPS controls, you can crouch, lie down, jump and lean side to side. Pretty standard stuff. The remote works well in that you control the gun well and it’s pretty accurate, if maybe a little too accurate - I’m a rubbish shot even after a week’s constant play.

The feedback’s good also, the remote vibrates from every gunshot, impact and explosion to the head. It’s very immersing and atmospheric.

But then there’s the downsides.

I’m not sure why it happens but there are short periods of absolute crappiness. When there’s a lot of action over a large distance, like for example you’re rushing a huge mansion and there’s up to 20 or so characters shotting the Hell out of everything in sight, the game dies.

Frame rate drops slightly which is understandable and it’s never for any more than a second or so (any longer and you’d be shot to death) but there’s another problem. The controls completely freeze.

It’s neither my remote nor the batteries, I’ve changed them both, but they just don’t work. And always at the worst possible time. I’ll rush into a room and I’ll suddenly lose the ability to shoot, the button just doesn’t respond and then suddenly my character with dart about the room without me controlling it often simply running for maybe 3 or 4 seconds face first into a wall while I’m being shot.

I don’t know where the problem is and it may be just my hardware after all but it absolutely ruins the experience and makes the game unplayable. Especially when I’m driving Vera, the British Army’s Jeep. It’s terrible to control anyway with the two remotes held like a steering wheel but it gets worse when suddenly I lose the ability to turn corners and the car just drives continuously into a brick wall. This happens so much that I’ve lost patience and I often have to restart the chapter because of the unresponsiveness or reset the console if worse comes to worse and all buttons stop working.

Overview
In short an excellent game, brilliant graphics, brilliant sound, brilliant controls but my experience was plagued with very buggy sections that forced me to quit.

When it’s not working 4/10.
When it is working 9/10.