For the first time Call of Duty comes to the DS, this is truly a remarkable performance. The control scheme is similar to that of Metriod on the DS, in which you use the touch screen for aiming and the control pad (or A,B,X, and Y buttons if you're a lefty) for movement. You can also sprint by double tapping forward and crouch by doing the same for down. The shoulder buttons are fire but everything else is controlled via touch screen. You go into your ADS (aiming-down-the-sight mode) by double tapping the touch screen. This is the one hiccup in the controls. Sometimes, you'll go into ADS when you didn't want to, and pop out of it in the middle of snipping an unsuspecting enemy.
The single player campaign holds eleven missions for you to gun down enemies in. You play as either a Russian or American secret operative soldier, and although you're supposed to be all stealthy, you always end up raging in and gunning everyone down. The missions themselves will task you with playing as the soldier, hopping on a Jeep for turret fire, disarming bombs, arming bombs, and even taking the control of a turret on a helicopter (which is awesome because you can blow-up cars with that kind of firepower). The missions take about 20 - 30 minutes each, so I finished the single player mode in about 2 days. Although this is slightly shallow, the multiplayer mode almost makes up for it.
Multiplayer has two modes. The first is a simple one cartridge deathmatch with up to four people. You're given an M-16 and your job is to kill all your friends for a total of ten kills. The fun truly racks up with the multi-card mode, though. Now, you can chose one of four different types of games: deathmatch, team deathmatch, hunter vs. prey, or capture the flag, one of four factions, one of five guns (AK-47, M-16, shotgun, sniper rifle, and RPG), and one of seven maps (with one cartridge you can only chose one of the two simplest). Still, chances are you aren't going to convince three of your friends to get the same game, and meet at one time in one place just for multiplayer.
The graphics were a surprise for the system, and I was happy to see nice environments and solid enemy animation. Though the blood was poor, it was kind of funny to see the red squares pop up when ever you shot someone. Still, my favorite part of the game is when you enter a new room and your opposition screams "ENEMY!" in the same style everytime (you have to hear it to laugh at it).
Overall, the game provides a solid, yet short-lived first person shooter experience for the DS. Though it does have some rivals like Brothers in Arms and Metriod Prime Hunters, it beats the former out with multiplayer and the later with a game totally focused on shooting, not so with Metriod. Somewhere in the 7.8-8.0 range for Call of Duty DS.
