This is the number question I ask before I go ahead and buy a game. The games I play over and over are the ones where I can skip the cut scenes, no matter how interesting they are. Imagine playing on the hardest difficulty and dying over and over just to go through that creepy cut scenes like the ones in Call of duty 3. Developers like Bungie, Infinity Ward and BioWare gets it right, at least all the games I played from them. I am always looking forward to games developed by these developers.

Why now? I was reading a review about Haze and it said we could not skip cut scenes and some of them are 10-15 minutes long. Do you imagine yourself playing this game a second time if the long cut scenes cannot be skipped? I am not. In fact I am not playing this game at all for other factors pointed out by reviewers.

I did not play Call of Duty 3 for a long time. That is about 10 months now. Now that I am done with all single player achievements for Gears of War, I popped this one back to get that 150 achievement points for finishing the game on veteran difficulty.

I really dislike the way this game is designed and executed. I probably will never buy another game from the same developer. The game is messed up all over. The physics was not tested very well. Many places you see things popping out of walls. You see your comrades running through walls. You get stuck and die on a thin piece of metal or wood lying on the ground. The game is full of “I cannot believe this is happening” moments.

In Call of Duty 2, the shouting was so real you had the urge to act on it. In this one there is no real shouting. A few shouting that you hear doesn’t convince you in to action. In Call of Duty 2 you really cared for your squad mates and they cared for you no matter what the difficulty level was. In this one every one of the squad mates has a total stranger feeling about them. I never felt that they would help me out or watch my back. I kind of stay away from them because they stop me from ducking from bullets. I got killed way too many times because my squad mates blocked me from ducking.

Another funny thing about these so called squad mates is that they will jump in to the line of fire between you and the enemy all the time. They won’t shoot but just get killed. But if you keep shooting when they jump, they will get killed by your bullets and the game stops saying “Friendly fire will not be tolerated”. I am guessing that they inserted this game play everywhere just to make that point. Throughout the game I was more frustrated about these dumb squad mates being in your way than anything else. The feeling of camaraderie? Yeah right, not this game.

The AI, whether it is your squad mates or enemies, is really dumb. Your squad mates just keep pouring in to the enemy fire and dies. The enemies keep spawning at the same location and fire non stop. You get frustrated by playing the same dumb sequences over and over because check points are far and few and you get killed by invisible enemies or stupid actions by your squad mates.

What were they thinking when they decided to make me rotate left and thumb sticks for a while throughout the game in the name of planting charges, rowing the boat or aiming the mortar gun. It has nothing to do with the game play. Keep rowing, you missed, you missed, and then you die. I almost threw away the game disc in the trash can at this point. A first person shooter game should not be about how well I rotate the thumb sticks. The melee attack, it is a shame. It is a completely scripted act where you just follow a set of randomly picked sequences. Random key sequences for planting charges. I am glad that I did not have to follow random keys to shoot, crouch and run.

This game has zero replay value for one reason. It makes you sit through those long and dull cut-scenes every time. There is no way to skip them, there is no way to pause them and they have such lousy dialogs that I feel like puking. The game has one sound adjustment. If you increase that, you have to listen to the music at high volume to listen to the dialog and battle sounds. Not that I want to listen to the dialog, but I need to hear how and where the battle is going on.

After writing this rant I wanted to see what others have thought about this game. I found most people have same views. Even the walk through’s have a sense of frustration at the game. Here are some links. They are pretty old. I know I am late. But the game wasn’t that much to keep me interested.

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/xbox360_cod3.asp

http://www.gamingtarget.com/article.php?artid=7358

Personally, this may be the last game I purchase on the day one from this developer. Going forward I may rent their games to check it out.

I kind of expected this when I first heard that the 3rd installment of the franchise is not developed by Infinity Ward. 2 hours of play and I am already bored.

I started with normal difficulty single player. The AI is so dumb at this difficulty level. The Germans are staring at me with their guns but not reacting to my movement in many places. In other places I am shooting at half a dozen of them from behind and they never look back. This kind of behavior is appropriate for easy difficulty.

The game looks very nice in many places. The leaves on trees move very naturally, smoke looks better than previous one. But the rain drops are not natural and muddy water flowing is not natural. It definitely doesn’t feel next generation. I feel like I went back and played Big Red One on the original xbox.

Update 11/13/06:

After playing the whole game, I have changed my mind a lot. I still would not compare it with CoD2 but it is not as bad as lots of other games out there. Both these games are nowhere near  Gears of War.  It took about 16 hours to finish the game in normal difficulty. More on the game later.

I have played Call of Duty 2 for almost a year now, both on PC as well as XBox 360. Based on the trailers, it looks like a worthy game to wait for and play on. Look at the preview at Gamespot. It doesn’t look promising from their descriptions. I am disappointed that Infinity Ward is not making the game.