Call of Duty: World at War (aka CoD: WaW) is the follow up to the smash hit Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare developed by Infinity Ward. CoD: WaW is developed by Treyarch Studios who brought you such awful titles like Call of Duty 3. CoD3 was one of the first games I played on my Xbox 360 and, well, let’s just say I didn’t keep the game for very long. With the huge success of Modern Warfare, Treyarch has learned the valuable lessons that made Call of Duty 4 so popular and what provided it with such a long shelf life.
One of the advantages Activision has with its Call of Duty franchise is that it rotates developers each year. Treyarch took full advantage of the Call of Duty 4 engine; the environments are stunning however there wasn’t an improvement over the CoD4 graphics. As soon as I received the flamethrower in the story mode, I caught myself on several different occasions setting grass and trees on fire just because it looked cool. The audio was exceptionally well done and the voiceovers were good. The soundtrack was something I really liked about the game. There’s nothing like playing as American solider and hearing some classic rock in the background to get you pumped up to shoot enemies or blow things up. It didn’t quite work the same for me when I was playing as a Russian Solider.
One of the first things you will notice when you start the single-player campaign is the level of realistic violence. Body parts get dismembered and there is a lot of blood. These visuals should make you realize how violent and bloody WWII actually was. You could be walking through a jungle environment with your flamethrower setting grass and trees on fire and then suddenly have a Japanese Solider come out of a trench and start attacking you. Overall I found the single player campaign very fun. The action was well paced but the campaign wasn’t very long. One of my major concerns lay in the fact I found my character seemed to have a big target on his head and his AI buddies were just along for the ride. I was constantly under siege with grenades. No matter where I was the on the map they found me. My saving grace? There are a ton of checkpoints in each level.
There was a level in Call of Duty 4 called “Death from Above” that put you in control of the guns on an AC-130 Spectre gunship. You played the level from the perspective of a person watching a thermal television. That level was one of the best levels of CoD4 as it put real war into perspective. World at War tried to copy this feat by having you man one of three weapons aboard a plane and rotate from weapon to weapon. When you’re not blowing up U-boats, you are rescuing survivors. I’m not quite sure what Treyarch was going for in terms of mood, but it felt sloppy. Overall, it felt out of place.
The co-op campaign takes a page of out Halo 3 by offering campaign scoring, which is a nice addition, and a new feature called death cards. What are death cards you ask? They are similar to the skulls found in Halo 3. Different death cards can be used to add extra challenges to the game.
The weakest part in the Call of Duty: World at War package is the multiplayer. It feels like they did an export of CoD4 and added World War 2 guns and character models. CoD: WaW didn’t innovate or improve on anything from CoD4’s high ranked multiplayer mode, giving CoD4 players little reason to leave familiar territory for something new.
Conclusion
Call of Duty World at War is a very fun game that tells a very good story about the Pacific Rim. Treyarch vastly improved their performance on this edition of Call of Duty but didn’t do enough to set it apart and make me want to leave Call of Duty 4. The “if it’s not broke don’t fix it” attitude seems to have been applied to this game. I’m not sure it justifies spending $59.99 on this game during a holiday season filled with so many Triple A titles.
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