This past weekend I was able to find a little bit of time to play the Call of Duty WW2 private beta on Xbox One. I already have the game pre-ordered so the beta wasn’t really going to sway me one way or the other. While public betas like this are a decent representation of how a game will play once it’s released, a lot of things can still change between now and when the game is released. Not to mention that we’re only seeing a portion of the game right now and there are still many things the developer hasn’t shown us.
That being said, here are my thoughts on the Call of Duty WW2 beta as I experienced this past weekend.
Call of Duty WW2 Beta
Bottom line is, I really enjoyed myself once I got into it. While the atmosphere and maps themselves have themes and elements we’ve seen before in war games, it was a refreshing to not have to worry about enemies flying at you from above or running off of the walls. I will say though that I wasn’t terribly impressed with the map design for the few maps that appeared in the beta, so I hope the ones we haven’t seen yet are a little more polished and balanced. I will also say that some of the sound design was amazing, while some of it was a little off, especially the footsteps. It seemed like sometimes footsteps are super loud and sometimes they are super quiet, there didn’t seem to be a consistency to it, but maybe it was just my headset.
Boots-on-the-ground has been thrown around since WW2 was announced earlier this year, and that’s exactly what I experienced with this installment in the Call of Duty franchise. It’s still not quite as good as say Call of Duty 4 or Black Ops 1 & 2, but this is the first time Sledgehammer has tried to give us a true Call of Duty experience… we’ll just try to forget about Advanced Warfare.
I honestly feel that WW2 feels a bit like World at War, which is definitely not a bad thing at all. Of course, as I mentioned above, level design is going to be key here, and so far what we’ve seen isn’t that great. In terms of weapon power and hit markers and things of that nature, I think there could be some improvement as well. I know I was still a low level when the beta ended, but I felt like some of the lower level guns are way too underpowered compared to some of the higher level guns, which lead to a lot of lost gun battles. But that could have also been me… my aim was way off since I haven’t played a Call of Duty game since Rainbow Six Siege came out, so my sensitivity and reflexes have changed to fit that play style as opposed to the run-and-gun style of CoD. But I’m sure I’ll get back into the swing of things once this game comes out fully in November.
I will say that I had a hell of a lot of fun running around with the M1 Garand as it brought be back to my days of dominating on Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360. It does feel a little different than I remember, but that’s to be expected since Call of Duty 2 was released almost 12 years ago. Either way though, I really liked the familiarity of it’s semi-automatic, twitchy finger, feel… however, I did notice that there is some disconnect between how fast I can pull the trigger on the controller versus how fast the actual gun can shoot, which I didn’t care for.
A couple other things I liked, the UAV’s are actual planes overhead, which I thought was really cool. The animation when you go on a bombing run is slick, and the killstreak rewards, at least in the beta, didn’t seem to clog up the matches as they tend to do in some of the other installments of the game. I also thought the War Mode was pretty cool, but it’s fucking hard trying to take that bridge…
After spending some time with the beta, I’m still pretty pumped about the game. I’m looking forward to going back to what I remember Call of Duty being like before it tried to capitalize on the success of Titanfall. I hope Sledgehammer is taking into account some of the feedback that they’ve been given because of this beta and tweaking some of the aspects of multiplayer that people were complaining about. But overall I think the game is pretty good and a lot of those people complaining are probably just people who haven’t fully experienced a Call of Duty game like this before.
So what did you guys think of the beta? We’d love to hear your comments down below.
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