Call of Duty: World at War(Playstation 3) Review

This might be the CoD campaign I have the biggest soft spot for. I've beaten this one more than any other. It's also the first CoD game I ever finished and probably the game I spent the most amount of time with over the years. After playing so many CoD games and WW2 titles by extension, I still enjoy World at War. Yes, at the time the game wasn't game changing enough nor was it enough to put an end to the WW2 game fatigue that permeated the decade it came out. If you look at WaW in isolation, it's a solid and well made game that did everything the WW2 CoDs up until that point did but with the most polish and precision.

The best way of describing WaW's entire campaign is that it's esstentially all the WW2 CoDs and by extension Medal of Honor but now darker and ediger. Everything is bloodier, gorier, and much more brutal than before.

This leans into the gunplay which is the most visercal the series ever felt up until that point. Limbs will go flying off when hitting them with heavy machine guns, headshots will have enemies' heads up right out, grenade explosions will have limbs and torsos fly off, characters will slowly die and react horrifically to be burnt alive.

It's also the loudest and punchiest these WW2 guns have felt. I still have the weapon sounds of the M1 Grande, MP40, Browning 40, Russian SMG and Tompson still in my head. It was also nice that you can reload the M1 this time around.

I do like how there is a radar here that keeps tracks of enemies nearby enemies on the map. Some can say it's not really immersive but at least I can keep track of me being in an enemy's sightlines.

The campaign in the specific have the Japanese sniping you in the trees, bonzai charges and hiding in the grass to get the drop on you or how every Pacific mission starts with the Americans getting ambushed. This contrasts with the Russian campaign where you start off as a small force that slowly becomes one that overwhelms the Nazi reigme. Not even a flooding of a subway can stop you.

Soundtrack is some of the best in the series and really fits the battles going on and the cutscenes too. It could be me playing the game so many times but there are games I've played multiple times that I don't even remember the OST as much compared to this game.

This all contributes to the atmosphere this time around and even with series underlying premise of a group of soldiers working together to take down an overwhelming force. Due to the very nature of how brutal the campaign is, it reinforces just how many scarifices the soldiers and your squad had to go through to get as far as you did or how just how overwhelming off odds that the player went through to get to the end of the game.

The Russian campaigns tend to be the high point of the Infinity Ward WW2 CoD games but it starts off even more so in a memorable way with the player and Reznov hiding under a bunch of corpses evading Nazi patrols.

It's rather poetic that the final level ends with the Russian flag being hosted up since this was the final WW2 CoD game released for a long while so it felt like a triumphant note to end on.

Since the beggining of the series, CoD campaigns always tried to capture the feel of being in an epic war movie and I'd say when you combine all this together when also added with the presentation and level pacing of the previously released CoD4, it creates a feel and atmosphere that the emulates those movies and scenes perfectly.

While being the best CoD campaign of the WW2 variety, there are some problems. Grenades are all over the place, it is so easy to randomly getting killed by walking into a grenade right when it explodes or be at critical health wait for health to regen have to run away at critical and then get shot down. It was joked for a while being called "Grenades at War" and this will have to be content with even no normal difficulty.

The QTEs for the dogs and bonzai attacks can feel like RNG and luck at times. I'm sure you could get it down but the infrequency makes the timing hard to really get down.

Even with the radar from time to time, it is easy to get gunned down from enemies from far away who have line of sight on you.

Since this is a WW2 CoD game that means there is a high chance of an air ship turret mission and this is one of the better ones due to the music. It really gets blood pumping even if it is just an on rails sequence where all you do is shoot down ships and planes as the screen is auto scrolling.

You can also randomly get killed to accidentally not following the game's script like getting close to the path of where a tank moves or having scripted enemy spawn as you are running forward.

Overall, in spite of it's problems and there might be a bias here but this CoD campaign is one of the more memorable ones to me. It does have it's problems but it's short length and quick rapid fire pacing never makes them utterly unbearable.