Call of Duty: Roads to Victory

Activision has confirmed that Infinity Ward is working on a Call of Duty game.

Activision is planning to bring three new Call of Duty titles to market between now and April 2012.

Activision exec Tom Tippl has said there are plans to charge Call of Duty fans for online features in future.

Like all the other games in the Call of Duty series, Roads to Victory is bursting at the seams with cinematic intensity and gritty historical realism. It depicts World War Two from the perspective of the American 82nd Airborne Division, the Canadian 1st Army, and the British Parachute Regiment, and it's full of nasty Nazis, big explosions, shouting soldiers and lots of shaking cameras. And it's probably one of the best first person shooters on the PSP. But like all the other first person shooters on the PSP, Roads to Victory is constrained by the technical limitations of the platform.

Those limitations include textures that rarely rise above adequate quality and glitches that range from the mildly annoying to the incredibly irritating. Over the course of the game's 14 short missions you'll get stuck on the scenery, and shot through walls that prove impervious to your own firearms. Your squad mates will do all they can to impede your progress and you'll find yourself restarting checkpoints with limited ammo and all the replacements will have disappeared. It's the sort of list that plagues most similar titles on the PSP, but the most obvious, and most obviously damaging limitation is the lack of a second Analog stick.

As with most similar titles on the PSP, Roads to Victory attempts to make up for it by implementing an auto-aim system, and as with most similar titles on the PSP the result feels like an uneasy compromise. Clearly the PSP's face buttons aren't up to the job of precision aiming, so some sort of auto-aim is entirely necessary. Indeed, Roads to Victory doesn't even offer the default FPS controls where movement is mapped to the left stick and look is mapped to the right stick, which can sometimes cause confusion in the thick of battle, but in general the default set up works pretty well. It's just that it feels a bit of a cop out to have the auto-aim do all the work for you, and it essentially leaves you two choices of difficulty: astonishingly easy or ham-fistedly hard.

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Activision has released a bit more information about PSP version of Call of Duty, including its official name and some screenshots.

Call of Duty: Roads to Victory, it's called, and it's in development at Amaze, who will be aiming to get the game done in time for a spring 2007 release.

Like the other games in the World War II first-person shooter series, you play as multiple characters - in this case an infantry soldier in the 82nd Airborne, a Canadian First Army rifleman and an elite British Para Regiment commando.

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US magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly has revealed some interesting new details about Call of Duty 3 - including news that it'll feature a multiplayer mode for up to 24 players.

As detailed on the Xbox.com forums, CoD 3 will offer single or splitscreen multiplayer, and a new 'War' mode. Axis and allied teams will battle for strategic locations and vehicles, and you'll earn new abilities as you earn points - for example, scouts will only be able to call up a couple of artillery barrages at first, but as they gain more experience they can order more sustained attacks.

Gameplay changes will affect the way you do stuff like planting bombs - there's no more plain old pressing of the A button, you've got to go through the proper motions now. You might find yourself attempting to row a boat whilst simultaneously firing at your enemies, and you can expect a bit of hand-to-hand combat too. They're getting rid of the load times between levels, rather neatly.

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