Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - Reflex Edition

As welcome as this level of control customisation ought to be, it all feels a tad unnecessary, and you're left wondering whether the preset you've plumped for is really the most suitable. Treyarch could have simply nailed a default setting that worked off the bat and left tweaking for those who feel like it, rather than foisting a ton of options on you before you've even had a chance to try the game out.

Once you adapt, though, Modern Warfare controls in much the same way you expect from a Wii FPS - albeit with a few minor variations. Pointing the Wiimote doubles up as look and aim, while the nunchuk stick controls direction. B fires your weapon, Z aims down the sight, C toggles your stance, + and - throw primary and secondary grenades, while A doubles up as a means of locking the camera while you fire and also makes you run. The d-pad houses the remainder of the controls, including weapon-switching, melee and jumping, while inventory access requires holding left on the d-pad and then confirming with a control-stick direction.

Cramming so many options onto the Wiimote and nunchuk can make things fiddly in the heat of battle, but for the most part it works fine. General movement and combat is intuitive and responsive, though the slower-than-usual turning speed makes it trickier to beat a hasty retreat when avoiding grenades. Tweaking sliders only improves the situation to a degree.

Sometimes, the doubling up of the run command with locking the camera works against you, too, so you'll curse your inability to move in a way that ought to be second nature. Indeed, things you've taken for granted for years in COD titles trip you up repeatedly on the Wii, and may leave you wondering exactly why Treyarch didn't include options for joypad control as well for those who prefer things that way. EA did exactly that with Need For Speed: Nitro, and it's a move others should adopt.

Once you've blitzed your way through the notoriously brief main campaign, the lure of the all-new Arcade mode might tempt those who have already played the game on other systems. Essentially the gameplay is exactly the same, but you rack up a score based on the accuracy of your shots, combined with the speed between kills to gain multipliers. Some sections (such as the awesome Epilogue bonus level) work better in Arcade mode than others, but the ability to choose individual levels rather than slog through the whole thing in order presents a more appealing means of replaying the game.

In terms of multiplayer, the Reflex Edition features exactly the same modes and maps as previous versions, in addition to drop-in, drop-out co-op campaign play where the second player controls a second cursor (also featured in the Wii version of World At War).

For competitive and team-based action, the whole affair is once again based on clocking up experience, levelling up and eventually unlocking new modes and variants, weapons, skins, challenges and more. Voice chat is, however, absent, and our experiments with the killing of others revealed plenty of lag issues - even when restricted to European connections. So far, the community appears to be fairly small, with the same dozen or so players cropping up in matches all evening, so it's questionable whether Modern Warfare will prove to be the all-conquering behemoth on Wii it has been on other platforms.

There's no denying that Modern Warfare remains one of the best shooters available, both in single and multiplayer, but releasing a technically crippled version two years later on Wii is a curious decision. The controls are far from the best, and no amount of menu sliders can mask the fact that the game just doesn't feel at home on Nintendo's platform.