Call of Duty: The Essential Collection

Welcome to Call of Duty: The Essential Collection! Your mission is simple: experience every Call of Duty game your 3DS can play. Consider this your field kit for portable combat. No matter which operation you choose first, there's a battlefield waiting for you. Now quit standing around and get to the drop zone, soldier!

Call of Duty: The Essential Collection

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare follows the same general conflict as the console game but tells its own parallel story through the SAS and U.S. Marines with missions jumping between stealthier operations and more direct firefights. The big star is the control scheme: movement stays on the buttons while aiming happens with the stylus and it works well once your hands get used to it. The touchscreen also handles weapon switching, crouching, explosives, binoculars and a few little action puzzles. Visually, it pushes the DS a bit while the voice work and sound design give the campaign a much bigger feel than expected. The weak spots are pretty obvious: the awkward ADS activation, cramped controls, simple enemy behavior and some linear shooting galleries. Still, for a first attempt, n-Space nailed the basic idea and people remember it as an impressive shooter despite its rough edges.

World at War

Call of Duty: World at War takes the same formula and gives it a darker World War II setting, covering the American and Soviet campaigns across more than 20 missions. You get jungle fighting, ruined European cities, mounted weapons, parachuting, mortar sections, mines and little touchscreen tasks that keep the campaign from becoming one endless stream of shooting. The engine is noticeably improved over Modern Warfare with better looking weapons, smoother movement and several voice works. Combat still feels recognizably Call of Duty, but the linear structure and repeated enemy encounters can wear you down and the story much thinner than the console versions as well.

Modern Warfare II

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II Mobilized is where the DS series starts feeling much more confident, even tho it still has some of the n-Space quirks. Set in the Modern Warfare universe with a completely separate storyline, it puts you through a campaign built around terrorism, military operations and the race to stop a nuclear threat. The shooting itself is satisfying with a good weapon selection and noticeably smarter enemy behavior than earlier games while the city, industrial and forest environments make the campaign feel less visually repetitive. There's also a nice spread of side activities including aircraft sections, computer puzzles and other touchscreen minigames. The downside is that aiming through iron sights can slow things down, performance gets shaky when the screen fills up and your hands can start begging for mercy after longer sessions. Still, the package is packed: campaign, Challenge and Arcade modes, Survival and multiplayer.

Black Ops

Call of Duty: Black Ops is the point where n-Space basically looks at the DS and says «You know, we can squeeze even more out of this thing». Instead of copying the console campaign, it creates a separate Cold War story told through debriefings and flashbacks, sending you through 16 missions with stealth, firefights, scripted set pieces and a bunch of different locations. The story is the weakest part since it tries to capture that paranoid espionage atmosphere but the narrative feels disjointed and more like an excuse to get you from one mission to another. Where it shines is gameplay: shooting is tighter, the controls are more flexible, graphics are prettier, the environments are busier, the campaign pacing is better than its predecessors and there's a good amount of extra content: Arcade, Challenge, multiplayer with unlockable perks and four Zombies maps that can be played cooperatively. Some vehicle sections are clumsy and solo Zombies is brutal but overall this is the most complete DS Call of Duty by a healthy margin.

Modern Warfare III

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III Defiance is the final entry and you can feel the annual release fatigue and the hardware starting to run out of road. Its campaign tells a parallel story around the events of Modern Warfare III, following American National Guard troops and British special forces as they deal with the Russian invasion. There are some fun set pieces, different environments, vehicle sequences and the familiar run and gun structure but the storytelling is thin and the campaign jumps around so quickly that it rarely leaves much of an impression. It's also a bit rougher with glitches and questionable checkpoints that make certain sections more frustrating than challenging. On the flip side, n-Space did manage to cram in a surprisingly robust multiplayer system with customizable loadouts, unlockable weapons, perks and challenges giving you toys to mess with. That multiplayer is why some players still defend it as one of the better portable shooters on DS, even it feels more like n-Space squeezing the last possible drops of life out of the DS than a proper finale.