I'm not a huge fan of shooters on the DS. I've found from way too many personal experiences that the handheld just doesn't have the muscle to support the sort of graphics and experience I like from my shooters.

Just last week I was playing Brothers in Arms on the DS and, while there were things I liked about the game, for the most part I felt like I was playing through the game out of more of a sense of obligation than because it was fun and I wanted to. So I was a bit reluctant when the Activision folks offered to show me their DS build for over-the-top shooter Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

While what I saw didn't leave me thirsting to play the game, it certainly did enough things right to perk my interest. The first thing I noticed was the the game had a nice selection of skins for good guys and bad guys, it also made use of voice both in missions briefings and during firefights to call out enemy locations and important actions.

The game has been designed to play through the same missions as the PC and console versions of Call of Duty 4, but instead of playing on Captain Price's team you run support throughout the game, taking out secondary targets to pave the way for his team and providing support from the air occasionally.

The game is broken down into three types of play. You've got the standard first-person shooter levels, which is a bulk of the game; helicopter missions, which essentially plays as a rail shooter; and as a gunner in an AC-130 high altitude support plane, which plays a bit like Touch the Dead.

The shooter levels were surprisingly solid, with crisp reaction to D-pad movements and stylus aiming. Tapping the shoulder buttons fired off shots and the sounds supported the gunfire enough to make it feel a bit more real than other games I've tried. You can double tap the screen to look down the site of your gun, or use your stylus to change up weapons or select grenades. While the game still has to make the best of a platform not really designed for shooters, it does the best with a bad situation and comes off fairly fun to play.

The gunship levels were fun, cruising along gunning down bad guys and blowing up cars. The only thing I didn't like was that the ammo seemed endless and nothing, like barrel overheating, seemed to prevent me from just endlessly shooting.

The Ac-130- levels were the most different of the three. You have no control over movements, like in a rail shooter, but can zoom in and out by changing the weapon types. Selecting the different weapons changes both the zoom level and the precision of the blasts you squeeze off. The whole thing is shown in a grainy-television-screen-meets-night-vision view which is both highly realistic and a bit disturbing. A voice tells you your objectives as they change from protecting the tiny glowing white silhouettes of your team to taking down buildings or targets. To shoot you just touch the screen with your stylus.

I'm not quite ready to start anticipating DS-shooters, but I am ready, I think, to sit down and play through this one when it comes out.

Contact information for this author is not available.