Also available on PlayStation 3, Wii, and Windows I first played Call of Duty: World at War when it originally came out a good 15 years ago, but back then, I played on Wii. To be clear, I unironically and genuinely love Call of Duty on Wii. With the 360 Call of Duty games being backwards compatible on Xbox Series X, though, I wanted to collect the old 360 games partly for nostalgia and partly to revisit them on a different system for fun. After all, they're dirt cheap these days. Call of Duty: World at War was the last World War II Call of Duty game for a long while. It's usually looked at as the black sheep of the WW2 CoD games, at least from my experience, and while I don't disagree with the assessment that the other World War II games in the series are better, that's not to say that World at War is bad. You spend the campaign bouncing between playing as American Marines fighting against the Japanese and Soviet army fighting against the Nazis towards the end of the war. Because, as we all know, Russians are terrible, I used a historical loophole to comfort myself and insisted that I was actually a Ukrainian soldier in the Soviet army. Probably wasn't true, but the thought of playing as a Russian in a heroic role is just gross. Anyway, you do a couple missions as the Soviets, a couple missions as the Americans, then back to the Soviets, etc. The campaign culminates with the storming of Shuri Castle during the Battle of Okinawa for the Pacific theater and the storming of the Reichstag during the Battle of Berlin for the European theater. The looks pretty damn good for a relatively early Xbox 360 game, and the action in the campaign is absolutely awesome. My main complaint with the campaign is simply that it feels a little disjoined, not with the content of the fighting itself. It's a bit jarring to jump back and forth between armies and theaters of war over the course of the game. That's not at all unusual for Call of Duty - the series still does that today - but it's not a method of presentation that I tend to prefer. Within the missions, though, there's a pretty solid amount of variety of action. In one mission, you clear out trenches and machine gun nests in the jungles of the Pacific with a flamethrower. In one, you play as a bomber gunner supporting American ships during a naval battle. Then you might be driving a Soviet tank through the German countryside, blasting German tanks and watchtowers along the way. In Shuri Castle, you get to pick up actual mortar shell and just yeet them at the enemies like gigantic grenades, and in the Reichstag, you have to contend with absolutely brutal combat against wave after wave of Nazi defenders. The storytelling and character presentation may have left a lot to be desired in my opinion, but the action was absolutely spot on. If all you want is a good World War II experience, there are truthfully better choice than Call of Duty: World at War. That doesn't mean that this one's a bad choice, though. Whether it's on Wii, PS3, 360, or PC, just because it's not the best at what it does doesn't meant that it doesn't do it well (super confusing but somehow grammatically correct sentences for $800, please Alex). If you're wanting a good World War II story, I'd turn your attention to Call of Duty: Vanguard or Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. If all you really care about is Nazi and Japanese killing action, though, you can do a lot worse than World at War. My Rating - B |
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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