This week we present part one of a review, in a two-part series on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Reflex

Everyone by now must have heard that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has been released, and is breaking records in sales over every genre you can think of. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare finally makes its way to the Wii. Now titled Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Reflex, it retains all of that Call of Duty goodness, with the realistic game play of the Wii.

Wii gamers

Wii gamers have been missing out on all the action, and lacked a serious FPS. With such high demands, 2008 brought them Call of Duty World at War, lacking a lot of content, but a serious step up from Call of Duty 3 on Wii. Mid-2009 brought The Conduit, a built-from-the-ground-up exclusive, meant to dazzle in visuals, show off the advantages of the Wii IR pointer, and have serious online content. Now, Treyarch returns to port over Infinity Ward's masterpiece in its entirety, and without a doubt it's the best shooter on Wii to date.

Modern Warfare is synonymous with big-scale, awesome story, great presentation, and some of the best gameplay in a shooter. With Reflex, things had to be toned down to work on the Wii hardware, but don't be fooled - the graphics is sealing good. First off, they bring back the stunning explosion and smoke effects from World at War, added in a couple of extra details that were lacking in World at War - like reflections on the water and scopes of the guns - and improved upon the amount of destructible items.

A couple of the visuals in World at War were addressed this year, mainly being the textures, frame rate. Reflex sports some of the best textures on any Wii first-person shooter. It's not using bump mapping like the original Modern Warfare, but rather it has textures that are called 'pre-baked' bump maps. But it still feels like better graphics have been achieved, and that there is room to grow.

Not a single thing was taken out of this impressive port.

On the flip side, despite being quite possibly the largest scale in sheer map size and enemy count alone, the game still keeps a solid 30 frames. Online, it didn't dip once for me - despite all the explosions and wreckage being blown up, it really seemed locked at 30. To be honest, I have never had any problems while playing online with the Wii, not one.

great sound effects

The story presentation is just superb, probably some of the best voice acting, mixed with great surround sound effects to make you feel like there's something going on all around you, and probably some of the most intense moments in any FPS - not to forget this is due to the speaker in the remote, which gives the feeling of bullets leaving your hand. The sound is also awesome - you've got some nice tunes mixed, though not played up enough to make you forget about listening for shots fired.

You can literally tweak everything from bounding box to turn speed (horizontal and vertical), there are just countless settings you can change, and basically just about everyone could find a setting that fits them. The settings and options are very similar to the PC - it even brings the lean function in from the PC version that's not on the other console games. It's a minor addition, since the lean is best for peeking around corners and not much else, but it's still welcomed.

O'Neil Walker

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Did you know?

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold 7 million copies on opening day!

2. Wii Sport has now sold 50.1 million copies in 155 weeks!

3. Super Mario Bros(NES) is the closest, with record sales of 40 million copies!