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 - BGears of War 2 was Microsoft's and Epic's follow-up to the absolutely killer original game. It unfortunately never got a remaster for a stronger Xbox console like the original did, but it's still playable on modern Xbox consoles via backwards compatibility. Since the Locust clearly weren't killed over the course of the first game, Marcus, Dom, Baird, and Cole are back to the battlefield against the reptilian horde, and you start off in the meat grinder almost from the get-go fighting off an attack on Jacinto, the last remaining human stronghold. From there, you launch into a massive counteroffensive to take the fight to the Locust. As you would expect, though, not everything does to plan; after all, no plan ever survives contact with the enemy. Over the course of the game, you finally get some solid character development for the Roid Boys and the glorious Cole Train. The game looks rough by today's standards, but it's pretty damn good looking for the time period and the hardware it was released on. I'd love to see a remaster like the original game got, but even without that, it's absolutely playable. The frame rate is consistent even on original Xbox 360 hardware, and if you're playing on Xbox One or Xbox Series X, that frame rate consistency is only more stable. Gameplay wise, it's pretty much exactly the same as the first game with no major changes or additions. The Hammerburst is a single shot weapon now instead of a burst fire weapon, but aside from that and a couple of new guns like the mortar and flamethrower, the combat and game mechanics are pretty much the same. Gears of War 2 is a great follow-up. The characters finally get some real development, the story and world get fleshed out a little, and the action gets a serious bump up. The game is still dreadfully drab with its desaturated color scheme, but that's just a product of being a gritty game made in the mid 2000s. The action still holds up extremely well today, and it's still a blast to play especially if you play co-op. My Rating - BAlso available on Xbox 360 and Windows Gears of War was one of the flagship IPs for Microsoft in the Xbox 360 days. Unfortunately, it's been somewhat neglected lately, but the Xbox One days still held some love for Gears of War. While Gears 2, 3, and Judgement have been neglected, the original game got a nice Xbox One remaster. It's got some bug issues, but it's definitely the way to play these days, and it's totally a game worth playing. The premise of the game is that humans on the planet Sera have, like the humans on Earth, been fighting each other for forever. That all changed on Emergence Day when the Locust, subterranean reptile people, burst from the ground and started ravaging the human cities. Clearly Hillary Clinton leads the Locust. You play as Marcus Fenix, a soldier for COG, the Coalition of Ordered Governments, as he works alongside Dom, Baird, and Cole (the best character in the entire series) to hit back at the Locust and win the war for humanity. Gears of War is a third person shooter where almost all of the men are victims of chronic steroid abuse. The roided up bros tear through the Locust - literally since they have chainsaws on their rifles - as they dart from cover to cover. Since this was a mid 2000s Xbox 360 game originally, the game exists almost exclusively in shades of grey and brown save for the red of the blood. It originally turned me off of the game back in the day - I hate the desaturated aesthetic that was so prevalent back in those days - but the game itself and its gratuitous violence is undeniably awesome. Gears of War was a trip down memory lane for me. Playing it co-operatively with my childhood friend Grant was a ton of fun and definitely more enjoyable than playing through solo. The original is available on Xbox 360, this remaster is available on Xbox One, and both versions are playable on Xbox Series X via backwards compatibility. It's also playable on Windows, so if you've never dived into Sera to battle the Locust, definitely give it a go. My Rating - BAlso available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Windows When I played the 2019 Modern Warfare, I had some pretty high praise for it. It was significantly better written than the old school Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and the voice acting was better, as well. Modern Warfare II from 2022 is a direct sequel to that reboot, and while I didn't think it was quite as good as Modern Warfare, it's a fantastic sequel and a much more engaging experience than the original Modern Warfare 2. After the events of Modern Warfare, Captain Price's special task force along with some key allies are fighting against Hassan Zyani, an Iranian officer in the Quds Force, showing that the game was clearly inspired by the real-world assassination of Iranian Quds Force General Qasem Soleimani. That's the kind of touch really elevates a game for me. In addition to Iranians, you also fight a Mexican cartel smuggling drugs across the border and aiding terrorists. In other words, the Trump administration heavily influenced the storyline of this game. The game's overall story was less interesting to me than the previous Modern Warfare game (probably because Mexican gangsters and Iranian terrorists are a little - but only a little - less fun to shoot than Russians). There wasn't a "No Russian" level, but there was plenty of other brutality to make up for it. The biggest advantage Modern Warfare II has is level variety. Sometimes you're shooting Iranians on a traditional battlefield, sometimes you're blasting Mexican gangsters in urban combat. Sometimes you're driving a truck through a chaotic highway battle, sometimes you're controlling the guns in an aerial gunboat. Sometimes you're using range and stealth to snipe enemies from afar, sometimes you're sneaking around incognito like James Bond. It never gets boring because you never know what the neve level will bring you. When I first fired up this game, I was stunned. I seriously pulled out my phone and texted one of my friends and said "I've seriously never seen a FPS game with graphics this good." It's not necessarily THE prettiest game out there of all genres, but at least of the FPS games I've played, Modern Warfare II is definitely the most visually impressive. Sound design is fantastic and the voice acting is stellar. The level design is, for the part, excellent with a lot of variety in objectives to keep things interesting. If you're into modern military shooters, then this is an excellent one. I'm not one for Warzone, but the regular multiplayer is just as much fun as you'd expect. As with most of the Call of Duty series, it's not perfect, but it's a damn good time. My Rating - A |
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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