Activision used to have this habit of trying to include Call of Duty releases for weaker hardware. Call of Duty 3 was full on multigen, Call of Duty 4 got releases on Wii and DS (although the latter was a totally different game), and Call of Duty: World at War got the same treatment with a Wii port, a different DS version, and now a PS2 side game called World at War - Final Fronts. This is basically the precursor to the Vita side game, Call of Duty: Black Ops - Declassified. Fortunately, Final Fronts isn’t as bad as Declassified, but it still leaves you feeling like it was a bit of a fumble. Like the main World at War on PC, PS3, 360, and Wii, Final Fronts has you fighting across different theaters of World War II. Unfortunately, it’s not just the visuals that took a big hit being on the PlayStation 2; it already felt like the B team did the writing for World at War, and Final Fronts’s script must have gotten the new hires’ unpaid interns. It’s just bland and uninspired, like eggs fried over hard with no salt or pepper; it’s not actively bad, but it’s definitely not especially good. If anything, the visuals actually are the highlight of the game as they look pretty impressive for the PlayStation 2. The controls are a bit clunky - odd considering that the PS2 controller is basically the PS3 controller plus a wire and minus the gyro controls - but they’re serviceable. World at War - Final Fronts has no multiplayer whatsoever despite the fact that the PS2 was capable of online play as well as LAN plan. That exclusion isn’t terribly surprising as relatively few games outside of Dreamcast and Xbox featured online play that generation, but the absence of any local multiplayer is rather disappointing considering that local multiplayer with AI bots was pretty commonplace on PS2 and its competitors. In fairness, though, by 2008, the world had moved on to favoring online multiplayer, and the AI bot multiplayer features had largely died off. It’s a bummer, but it’s not wholly unexpected. Call of Duty: World at War - Final Fronts is a cool piece of Call of Duty history in that it was an attempt to cater to the PS2 audience two years after its successor came out. Granted, the PS2 had some lingering third party support long into the PS3’s lifespan, but still, most of that was from sports games and shovelware; this was a major staple IP. It’s a shame, then, that it’s such a lackluster game. I definitely wouldn’t call it the worst game in the Call of Duty series - that dubious title goes to Black Ops - Declassified on Vita - but it probably is the second worst game in the series. It’s worth a play if you’re a World War II enthusiast, and it’s worth a purchase if you’re a PlayStation 2 enthusiast, but don’t go in expecting a blockbuster game. My Rating - D |
I'm a teacher.And I like to play video games. I like to collect video games. I like to talk about video games, and I like to write about video games. During the day, I teach high school history; during the night, I spend my spare time gaming. Then I write about it. Archives
April 2024
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