Review: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Mobilized

Nintendo DS

By Harley Ogier / Tuesday, June 01 2010

After a rather disappointing game of SOCOM Fireteam Bravo 3, I found myself wishing for a mobile First Person Shooter that’s actually half playable. Being the proud owner of a pink Nintendo DS, Modern Warfare Mobilized was really my only option.

Given the DS’s minimal computing power and limited graphical prowess, I really didn’t expect much. Fortunately, my expectations were completely wrong.

Modern Warfare Mobilized is not just a watered-down Modern Warfare 2. It’s a title designed from the ground-up for the DS, with its own complementary storyline.

Mobilized pushes the DS to its absolute limits, with true 3D graphics where you can look up and down: not false-3D as found in the original Wolfenstein and Doom games. Characters and weapons are all 3D as well, not just flat sprites pasted into the action.

The audio is good: it can’t compare to the PC or even a decent MP3 player, but the DS does a pretty good job of keeping your head in the game. The slightly rough quality only serves to make speech sound more like radio transmissions in a warzone, which suits Mobilized just fine.
Compared to SOCOM on the PSP, the controls are amazing. Mobilized uses the direction buttons for movement, and the DS’s touchpad for aiming.

This is pretty close to the keyboard-and-mouse controls of desktop FPS titles, and is easy enough to learn. It’s a little hard on the wrists after a while, but it works.

I’ve spent a thrilling few hours playing through Modern Warfare Mobilized, and intend to play it many times again. As far as mobile time-wasters go, it’s a good one.