The task is nearly Herculean. Take the Call of Duty franchise, known for its cinematic spectacle, and make a version for the Nintendo DS, not known for its super-duper advanced graphics. So you've got to admire the developers at n-Space for their pluck and determination. They've attempted nothing less than their own pocket-sized rollercoaster ride of an epic war shooter. The result is Call of Duty 4 for the Nintendo DS -- and while it may not work, it's not for lack of trying.

The single-player campaign consists of 12 missions, many loosely inspired by the next-gen versions of the game. Although this little Call of Duty 4 has the same ending as the more advanced versions, it takes the blandest path possible to get there. If you played either of those, you'll recognize some of the story beats, but you'll also miss the plots twists that made Call of Duty 4 so memorable. You still get the dual American/British storyline, but the difference here seems to consist solely of whether you start with an M-16 or an MP5.

You do get the Spectre mission, in which you're covering troops on the ground from within a circling C-130 gunship armed with enormous guns and a black-and-white thermal imaging camera. With the cool, calculating crew chatter and silent havoc blooming on the ground, this mission chillingly recalls footage you've seen of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You'll take a Humvee ride and a few helicopter missions in which you man a side-mounted gun while your view lurches about drunkenly, but for the most part, you're hoofing it, playing a cross between a first-person shooter and a brain-dead shooting gallery. Enemies will pop up for you to shoot. Dispatch them and move on to the next room. As with other shooters on the DS, you aim with the stylus on the touchpad, and you move with the direction pad (or buttons, if you're a lefty). The shoulder button fires your gun.

There are clumsy controls for crouching, aiming, running and throwing grenades, which you won't do very much. For instance, you have to tap the corner of the touchpad to switch to grenades, at which point you then have to aim and throw them. By that time, you'd have been better off just shooting the bad guys. Bringing up your iron sights requires a tricky double-tap, which means lifting your stylus and then re-engaging it to aim. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just messes you up, which is the exact opposite of what bringing up the iron sights is supposed to do. On the whole, aiming, crouching, sprinting and grenade tossing are rarely worth the effort, which is a shame since those are important parts of the Call of Duty experience.

However, plenty of classic Call of Duty elements are present. There aren't any medkits (you take cover to heal up before you totally "red out"), ammo and enemy weapons are plentiful (you'll probably get most of your kills with an AK-47), and headshots are deadly (and easy, since the enemies tend to stand in one place to shoot at you). The weapon variety is disappointing, as there are only about a half-dozen guns. There's never any reason to use a pistol, and only a couple of the guns are worth picking up.

You sometimes get friendlies tagging along with you, but you're mostly solo. The action is occasionally put on hold for bomb disarming and hacking mini-games. Disarming bombs is a matter of quickly tracing wires. Hacking is a tile game with pipe sections that will reveal a four-digit code, which you then tap into a number pad. The number pad is an entirely superfluous step, but it's a nice touch that shows a little love for the DS' touchpad.

On precious few occasions, the game will attempt something resembling spectacle. An air strike takes out a bridge; a water tower topples onto a truck; a train plummets into a canyon; or an ICBM roars out of an underground silo. These are efforts towards Call of Duty's cinematic scripting, but they don't really work. It's like watching a school play with kindergarteners and cardboard backdrops. You're reaction might be "Aw, look how cute," but unless that's your kid up there, the whole thing seems silly and slightly precious. That's probably not the effect n-Space was going for.

Blame it on the DS. You could say the little system barely even does 3-D -- at least not what you consider 3-D these days. The low polygon count and the low resolution textures make the PSP look like a next-gen marvel of holodeck-level photorealism. DS shooters like Bionicle Heroes and Metroid Prime: Hunters work around this with stylized graphics and varied gameplay, but the Call of Duty formula doesn't lend itself to that approach. Instead, it's stuck imitating its bigger brothers.

Metroid on the DS also shows up Call of Duty 4 by demonstrating that the little system is perfectly capable of multiplayer support over the Internet, as well as bot matches against the artificial intelligence. But you get neither in Call of Duty 4. There are a good variety of game types for up to four players locally, and the weapon choice adds a bit of tactical finesse missing from the single-player game. There's an option to set up games for other players who don't own Call of Duty 4, but you're limited to team deathmatch on only two maps. On the whole, the multiplayer support is a disappointing missed opportunity.

It's a shame the single-player can't take up the slack. The storyline is too short, and there's no incentive to replay it. The game would have benefited from some sort of achievements, or even something simple like high scores or hidden collectibles. Instead, it's a stripped down fire-and-forget experience, demonstrating that if you want to develop for the Nintendo DS, you can't just treat it like any other system. Minus its spectacle, this Call of Duty turns out to be a disappointing shooter with very little to recommend it.

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.