I have been playing first-person shooters since Doom debuted on the PC, and few since then have stood out as much as Call of Duty 2. I first played the game in 2005, in a Circuit City while on vacation in New Orleans. While everyone else was shopping for presents, I went to the videogame section to check out all the new demos. I saw someone playing Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360 and was intrigued. After the person quit, I started playing and instantly got hooked.

I proceeded to play the same level over and over again while the rest of my family shopped. After that, whenever I went to any store that had the demo, I would play it the whole time I was there. The game was just that good. And still today I consider it to be one of the best Xbox 360 games. So naturally I was excited about trying out Call of Duty 4 on the DS. Can it possibly live up to its predecessors? Read on to find out.

I first should say that this game is not developed by Infinity Ward, the excellent team behind COD 1, 2, and 4. It is developed by N-Space, the people behind Geist on the Gamecube and Duke Nukem: Land of the Babes on PC. After learning this, I started to get a little worried. I thought, “How could this game possibly be in the same league as the others?” But I was still confident; I mean, it is Call of Duty after all. So anyway, on to the actual game.

Where N-Space has really succeeded is in capturing the feel of the Call of Duty games in the sound department. You constantly hear soldiers yelling in the heat of battle, punctuated by gunfire and grenades exploding. It really makes you feel like you are in the middle of a battle. But it gets better: the music in the game is excellent, easily some of the best on the DS. It has that epic movie feel which really boosts the experience of the game to another level. However, this is the best part of the game and everything just goes downhill from here.

While the first part of the presentation — the sound — is excellent, the graphics are decent at best. The actual visuals are not terrible but they are plagued with problems. Some of the levels have pretty bland textures and I continually got graphical glitches on the top screen, something that has never happened to me with any other DS game. In addition to these two problems, there is a considerable drop in framerate in some areas, which is especially a problem in first-person shooters. But graphics alone don’t make a game; so how is the actual gameplay?

Not good, actually. What seems like a good idea on paper really doesn’t work out for this game. The aiming, moving, and shooting controls are the same as in Metroid Prime: Hunters: move with the d-pad, aim with the stylus, and shoot with L. However, Call of Duty is not just a run and gun game, it’s about pinpoint accuracy and ducking behind cover, and neither of these is implemented well.

Ducking is done by pressing the down button twice, which isn’t so bad in itself; but try doing that while pressing the other directions and it gets a bit more complicated. This wouldn’t ruin the game by itself, but coupled with the aiming mode it significantly hampers gameplay. You go into the aiming mode by double tapping the screen. Now, I don’t know if I just have twitchy hands, but I went into aiming mode on accident more times than I can count, and some of these incidents resulted in my death. Even so, if these were the only problems, the game might still be worthwhile. Unfortunately, they aren’t.

While the sound makes you feel like you are in a big battle, the actual game does not. It has the “duck here, shoot, run to the next cover” level design like the other Call of Duty games, but since it is harder to be accurate with the DS, N-Space seems to have compensated by making your character take an insane number of hits. Even on the hard difficulty the better strategy is not to fool around with ducking, but instead just to stand there and shoot the enemies. And since the level design is based on the other Call of Duty games, the game is basically just a shooting gallery.

Then the last level is just a huge mess. There is an area with an invisible sniper, and the last part of the game is a “protect this guy for a certain amount of time” type of thing. So it ends up being neither a good Call of Duty game nor a good FPS. Not everything is bad though; there are two levels that are excellent. In these levels, you ride on a helicopter and shoot enemies on the ground/in other helicopters/on cars, which can actually be a lot of fun. But these two alone can’t make up for the rest of the levels in the game. Thankfully, I suppose, the game is only around five hours long.

After you’re done, there is nothing else to do besides multiplayer, which has its own set of problems. Firstly, there are no online options, though there is a single-cart multiplayer mode which is actually better than the main game. The options are understandably scarce, but that’s to be expected. The real killers for the single-cart multiplayer are that you can only play to ten kills and you have to reload the game after every match, which takes a couple minutes and is totally not worth it. The multi-cart multiplayer seems to have a lot of options and appears well thought-out, but obviously you need another person who owns the game. And I don’t think I will ever know anyone who will buy this game.

Overall, I can’t really recommend Call of Duty 4 DS. Maybe if you have played all the other great FPS games that came out this year and desperately need another, or if the DS is your only system, it might be worth a look. But unless you can convince someone else to get another copy of the game for multiplayer, it is not worth your time or money. At best, you’ll get 5 hours of bad, if not completely terrible, FPS gameplay.

Pros

+ Helicopter levels are really fun
+ If you can convince a friend to get the game, the multiplayer is fun

Cons

- Low framerate on some levels
- Shooting gallery-style gameplay
- Graphical glitches
- Really short
- Bad controls

Score: