Which possible war? (Review: Call of Duty World at War)
Which possible war could a shooter choose to focus on to become the next big success? You guessed right, World War II! This war certainly hasn't been done to death in the movie, documentary, or gaming genres. World War II games have become like a lot of sports game franchises – a new one is released every year with upgraded graphics and new players licensed.
Call of Duty World at War (CoDWaW) marks the fourth (sixth if you include the United Offensive expansion and the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube exclusive Call of Duty 2: Big Red One) game in the Call of Duty (CoD) series to focus on World War II. I suppose by focusing on World War II the game becomes cheaper to produce as they certainly don't need to employee any story writers. Sadly Treyarch also decided not to employee too people to focus on the single player either, which despite the fun of a limitless flame thrower, was still a woefully short three hours of wave after wave of either Nazi's or screaming Japanese soldiers.
Treyarch seemingly thought to very little about growing the series leaving that up to Infinity Ward, who have made the only decent Call of Duty games (1, 2 & 4). CoDWaW is a modified version of the CoD4 engine – they've added up to four player co-op to parts of the campaign, but visually and game mechanic wise it feels like a step back. The game plays more like a "rails" shooter (ie Time Crisis or House of the Dead) with a lot of invisible walls restricting where you can or can't go – I came across a few open doors that I simply couldn't walk through – and I was propelled forward to my death on more than one occasion when my AI teammates decided to walk into me.
AI might be a little too kind, AS (Artificial Stupidity) might be more accurate. My main gripe with the first CoD game was that you single handedly had to do absolutely everything as your team mates couldn't hit the side of a barn from point blank range. As the series as progressed, the AI has slowly learnt how to fire a gun and even better than that, not relied on you to do absolutely everything to win the war. Unfortunately, CoDWaW makes another step backwards here and the AI again requires every objective to be completed by the player, which seemingly extends to killing every opponent. In CoD4 I noticed my AI allies would at least throw back grenades if they were close enough – in CoDWaW my allied AI aimed their grenades at me, killing me on numerous occasions.
If you love the Call of Duty series I would still recommend CoD4 (price alone makes it better value, let alone the better gameplay and larger single player campaign), but if you prefer a WW2 shooter and have no interest in single player this might be for you.
WW2 Shooter + no visual improvements + incredibly short campaign = One and a half out of five from me.
1 ½ / 5
Comments
One Comment
Trackbacks / Pingbacks
-
[...] graphics and oozes style; it focuses on a familiar - but not overdone (here's looking at you Call of Duty 5) post-apocalyptic world; a story driven game – rather than a series of "quests" that [...]