War. If we're to believe videogames, it was a loud, visually impressive affair, that resulted in dozens of clean and bloodless headshots, weapons that never jam, abundant and effective health-packs, ubiquitous checkpoints and kindly squad-mates with good intentions but a tendency to repeat themselves. It's a far-cry from the real deal, and is something developers of WWII war-games have been acutely aware of, driving them to constantly redefine how hyper-realistic their efforts are at drawing players right into the whole wretched affair.

As such, gamers are no longer satisfied duelling with Hitler in his giant mechanised armour or moving Tiger tanks on a hex-grid; they want cutting-edge graphics, eardrum-popping sound, historically accurate missions and an engaging story to boot. To date, no shooter based on the Second World War has quite managed to capture hearts and minds on every front, although Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 2 on Xbox 360 came pretty damn close. But now that they've abandoned ship it's up to the reservists at Treyarch – creators of the excellent Call of Duty: Big Red One for Xbox – to fight the good fight and deliver the Call of Duty 3 payload into our living rooms. But did they hit their target?

Where the previous Call of Duty games have covered a wide array of fronts and battles ranging from Africa to Italy, Treyarch have opted to go down the very specific path of dealing solely with the campaign known as the Normandy Breakout, which encompasses Operations Totalize and Tractable among others, and eventually, the Liberation of Paris. Unlike so many other WWII games, Call of Duty 3 does not include missions based on the infamous D-Day landings on Omaha and Utah beaches, but rather begins where these heroic and bloody assaults leave off: with the Allies struggling to get off the coast and deep into the heart of occupied France.

The Call of Duty series has never been shy of embracing not only lesser-known campaigns but also less famous military forces, and Call of Duty 3 is no different. Over the course of the game players will not only play as American troops, but also as a British SAS officer, a Canadian soldier and also a Polish tanker. It's great to see a developer embracing other nationalities and hopefully schooling Yanks who seem to think they were the only country involved in the war, and reminding people that a lot of countries lost a lot of good men during the conflict.

Sadly, the story in Call of Duty 3 isn't all it's cracked up to be, and ironically the fact that you're fighting from four different perspectives is part of the reason the game lacks any sort of power or emotional punch. It isn't for want of trying however; Treyarch try to tie the whole thing together through in-game cutscenes that transition from one nationality to another and highlight how the combined efforts of the various Allied factions were integral for the other nation's undertakings during the campaign. But at the end of the day, as a player it's often hard to keep track of not only who you are but what you're doing, and you'll wind up just running from A to B with little knowledge of why you're doing it. It's also sometimes problematic working out if players are referring to you or another named-character, so you may be wandering around looking for an anti-tank gun, only to discover an NPC was the one sent to find it. Which is strange given that the game forces you to sit through every cutscene and scripted briefing in its entirety, even when reloading from a checkpoint or simply playing a chapter as a one-off. Even then it's difficult to work out what's going on sometimes, not to mention incredibly frustrating as you sit through the same briefing for the umpteenth time.

With the action in Call of Duty 3 focused squarely on the Normandy Breakout and ancillary campaigns, the potential scope of the action has to be honed in on this one small part of the war. Unlike Call of Duty 2 – which embraced theatres of war in Africa, Western Europe and Russia via land, sea and air – Treyarch's follow-up is extremely limited in the material it has to work with if it wants to be historically accurate. There's some nice touches here to be sure; chasing down Germany's most fearsome tank-commander, Michael Wittman (who had some 140 confirmed tank-kills) and taking him out in tank-battle is satisfying even with the historical liberties taken. But despite the PR hype about this being the bloodiest and most important campaign of the War, it's hard to feel as swept up in an epic conflict as you did with Call of Duty 2 or even Big Red One.

The problem here is that old Call of Duty legacy of linear missions. In this case, Call of Duty 3 takes that complaint to a whole new level, with some missions that feel like on-the-rails shooters where you occasionally get funnelled into a nice big set-piece battle, only to be ushered back onto the tracks as the game leads you to the next encounter. When the game is going full tilt it's hard to complain – the massive battles at Chambois and The Mace are some of the most intense moments on the Xbox 360 to date – but when you're dragged from the action down into some anonymous cellar for a briefing, or plod through yet another house whose doors won't open to the next location, it's hard not to be a little disappointed with how Treyarch handle progression through the missions.

The other issue is that some of the missions just aren't that interesting to begin with. The first Polish tanker mission stands out as being particularly dull: your tank is near-indestructible, and you get to take shots at maybe a dozen tanks that appear from scripted locations during the mission. It's a real snooze-fest actually, and that's coming from Xbox World Australia's resident patriotic one-quarter Pole! Likewise the new close-combat QTE's that see you pushing buttons or squeezing triggers while the hand-to-hand fracas unfolds on screen are another boring inclusion. Scripting is the real weakness in the game however; it just never really feels organic except for incidental moments like part of a building being destroyed. And when this happens, the game's haphazard real-time physics can rear its ugly head, with bits of masonry and debris causing blockages on the battlefield. Or worse, when it traps the player in a certain area because of the almost farcically low jump-height, or in my case, when you get stuck inside the debris, awaiting a German's merciful execution and a frustrating restart to the last checkpoint.

Errant debris isn't the only blockage you'll encounter in Call of Duty 3 unfortunately; your squad-mates can create just as much trouble on the battlefield. Your team will routinely bottleneck in doorways or corridors, not to mention block your line-of-sight when you're trying to go for the kill. Thankfully you won't be penalised in this game for accidentally offing a colleague, but it can be mighty frustrating at times. The A.I. is to blame here, and while for the most part you're fighting along side a well-oiled combat machine, it's not uncommon to see friends (or foes) unexpectedly stop firing or moving altogether.

Even with your squad-mates doing their best to hamper your advance at times, you won't have any problem breezing through Call of Duty 3's Singleplayer campaign in a little over 6-8 hours on average difficulty. Unless you ramp it up to Veteran difficulty there's little challenge here thanks to Halo-style regenerating health and a forgiving amount of checkpoints. Not only is it easy, but it's short to boot, running at just under 15 missions long, some of which can be clocked in 15-20 minutes without breaking a virtual or actual sweat. Where many games rushed to release lack overall polish and finesse, Call of Duty 3 instead indicates the release-date crunch by feeling a few missions short of an entire campaign.

For a game whose publisher hype makes much ado about being part of the Liberation of Paris, it's quite odd indeed that the game does not allow you to participate in this part of the campaign at all. Instead, Call of Duty 3 closes abruptly with an in-game cinematic at the conclusion of the battle at Chambois and the closing of the Falaise Pocket. Both the closing of this net around the routed Germans and the subsequent capture of Paris could have provided at least 2-4 additional missions (or roughly another 2 hours playtime) to prolong the singleplayer game and flesh out the historical significance of the campaign, and you can only guess that the need to meet the holiday period deadline caused the axe to fall on these epilogue missions.

With all of that said, Call of Duty 3's singleplayer campaign is far from awful, in fact the reason for all the complaints is simply because it's enjoyable enough that you really don't want it to be over as quickly as it is. While Call of Duty 2 set the precedent as an Xbox 360 launch-title, the following months have allowed Treyarch to even further hone the already superb visuals into what is arguably one of the best looking games on the console to date. Indeed, the narrative focus has also allowed the team at Treyarch to dedicate all their efforts to perfecting the look and feel of France without worrying about a diverse array of other locations, and this shines through in every way. From the shattered streets of Saint-Lo down to the individual blade of grass on The Mace, every aspect of Call of Duty 3 just screams authenticity. In fact if it wasn't so likely to get you killed, you'd simply have to stop and marvel at the level of detail in the smouldering ruins of towns, or watch the water run down the slopes of hill.

Thankfully the game's fantastic sound effects and musical score are much less of a distraction, although there's nothing particularly unique about either. But, much like a good Star Wars game, aural familiarity is synonymous with authenticity, and as such Call of Duty 3 rings true. The voice acting is a little less diverse this time around, and you'll recognise the same three or four Germans shouting at you in their foreign tongue within the first few hours of gameplay. Again, this isn't so much a problem with the voice talent as much as it is a constraint of the limited variety of German troops in play here – this is an almost exclusively Wermacht affair, so don't expect any black-leather clad SS officers here. Nevertheless, the game sounds exactly as it should and its use of Dolby Digital surround sound really puts you slap-bang in the middle of the action.

Once you've slogged your way through the campaign and helped history run its course, Call of Duty 3 really comes into its element with a tidy array of multiplayer options. More so than ever before, the singleplayer campaign here feels like it is just a boot camp for the lavish multiplayer mode, although the game's appeal has already diminished on Xbox Live thanks to the likes of Gears of War. But, just like Call of Duty 2, there will always be a hardcore contingent playing soldier online so finding a game shouldn't be too hard. This time around expect the fighting to be even fiercer as players struggle to get some tough multiplayer Achievements that require players to play as support classes, as well as earn hundred (and then thousands) of points through kills and flag captures.

Likewise, be prepared for punishment with a host of new user-controlled vehicles including tanks and jeeps among others, which adds yet another dimension of Things-To-Worry-About while playing Call of Duty online! So far there's just shy of 10 multiplayer maps available and six different game modes ranging from your usual deathmatch and CTF efforts through to more involved modes like War. Better yet, the game now supports 24 players and actually allows multiple players from the one console, so all your mates who have refused to convert to the Xbox 360 can come and be wowed.

At any rate, the multiplayer maps are truly huge, and include a good variety of locations including a big dam, a maze-like French village, and an Oblivion-esque mausoleum and church. On the rare occasion you can fill a 24 player game these make for some intense encounters, but with the average Player Match seeming to fill about 6-10 uniforms on average, things can feel a little desolate. And while the gameplay is simple, the learning curve can be quite punishing for new players going up against Call of Duty veterans, who seem to account for much of the player population at the moment. Consequently, ranked games will often pit level 0 or 1 players against those with a rating of 20 or more, which makes for some pretty one-sided affairs. Still, this is true of most games on Xbox Live, so it's really just a matter of grabbing some mates and putting together games of your own.