If you’ve been reading this site or know me personally, you can tell that I love the Call of Duty series, well I guess I should say that I’m a huge fan of Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Like a lot of people I was quite disappointed in Treyarch’s attempt at continuing the series with Call of Duty 3, but I’m not here to bash them for that one. I’m here to give you my impressions/review of their latest attempt, Call of Duty: World at War.
I participated in the beta for this game a few months ago, so I held off on actually purchasing the game and got it for Christmas last week which is why it’s taken so long to write this review. And with the time off from work I actually had a good amount of time to sit down and finish the game. After finishing the campaign in about 8 hours (on hardened) I can confidently say that while I don’t feel the game lives up to Modern Warfare, it is definitely a great game and I would highly recommend it.
After loving CoD2, being disappointed with CoD3, and never putting down CoD4 to this day, I was a little leary of Treyarch giving us the next installment in the Call of Duty series, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. With the utter failure of Call of Duty 3, Treyarch was fighting an uphill battle following Inifity Ward’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I can’t thin of another video game that has kept my attention for an entire year straight. Sure I put it down occassionally to play games like Fallout 3, but I always came back to the online gameplay in Call of Duty 4. And even after playing CoD: World at War, I have a feeling I will still go back to the multiplayer on 4, but that’s not to say that World at War is a bad game, because in fact it’s just the opposite.
The way I kind of see it is it’s a combination of Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 3 with a hint of Call of Duty 4. It has a great gameplay of 2 and 4, along with the engine from 4, but the style of 3 just slightly more polished. The models seem more like 3 and the game looks a little bit more like 3 than 2 and 4 (textures/models wise) which is expected since it’s Treyarch’s game, not Infinity Ward’s. So let’s start with the campaign mode. I don’t really want to give a summary of the storyline since I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but the story was good. When I first heard that we were going back to World War 2 I immediately thought it was just going to be a rehash of what I’ve played in the million other WWII games, but it wasn’t. The game delivers on a unique story and great gameplay. I was a little disappointed in the sniper level, only because I wanted it to be like the sniper level in 4 and it didn’t live up to that. Overall the campaign mode took me about 8 hours on the hardened difficulty, I probably should have played on veteran, but I kind of wanted to just unlock Nazi Zombie mode.
So I must admit, as cautious as I was in purchasing this for myself due to Treyarch’s previous attempt, I was pleasantly surprised with how good the campaign turned out. I haven’t had a chance to play the campaign co-op yet, but it’s always fun playing through a game with your friends, so I have to imagine it’s pretty cool.
As far as multiplayer goes, this is where I’m left a little disappointed. Maybe it’s because I haven’t gotten used to the guns yet, but the multiplayer seems to play different than CoD 4. The controls seem a little different, but it could just be me. It’s not “bad”, but I still prefer the multiplayer in modern warfare. I like that Treyarch brought over the perk system as well as the level system. They also limited the range of grenades so that you can’t toss them straight to the spawns anymore. I will definitely level up all the way through in multiplayer before I completely write it off, but I’ll still fall back on Modern Warfare since I don’t think the amount of people playing it will drop off because of World at War.
So in conclusion I really enjoyed the campaign in World at War as for the multiplayer, I’ll have to give it a little more time before I can draw a conclusion, but some people really like it, other people really don’t. So check it out and form your own opinions.
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