Call of Duty: World at War Review - The last World War II shooter of the era.

By Sam Coles:

Now if I were to walk into a room these days and say I like playing Call of Duty people would probably disregard my opinion about gaming although I do play all sorts of games, but the fact I like to play game where I can turn brain off for a bit makes me a casual. Call of Duty from a technical and content aspect is not a bad game because they’ve always provided consumers a full gaming package with singleplayer, multiplayer and a co-op experience. I’m digressing a bit I’m here to talk about one of the best Call of Duty games from the Xbox 360 and PS3 era and that game is World at War. World at War was the last major World War II shooter released during that era and if you were around during the period from 1999 to 2008 there was an over saturation of that type of shooter.

World at War’s campaign tells a story that is fresh compared to other shooters that are set in the era where they tell same story from the European front, no World at War starts with a torture scene as you and your fellow marine have been captured by the Japanese and I have to mention that this game is really violent and gory. You play from the perspective from two different countries, you play as the US marines in the Pacific fronts and you play as the Soviets during the invasion of Berlin when the Soviets sent in 1 million soldiers to storm the Reichstag, the campaign is tense and exciting and shocking with the gory content which I was surprised that it was rated a 15 at the time it was released, but I think they wanted younger audiences to realise that war is hell.

The gameplay is similar to Call of Duty 4 as it runs on the same engine as that game so you point and shoot and the enemies generally die, but with the added effect with their arms exploding into meaty chunks. Enemies have different tactics especially in the Pacific fronts where they lay out traps on the ground or they will hide in trees and snipe you, this can get tricky on Hardened or Veteran difficulty. This is where they start to use famous actors to voice characters in the series with Keifer Sutherland and Gary Oldman voicing in this game and Gary Oldman would continue to voice in Treyarch’s next project Black Ops.

Graphically the game still looks really good even the character models look great with wet skin textures showing when they emerge from water to the veins showing up on the side of the head. The environments look fantastic with war torn beaches to the bombed out and grey pallet of the depressing streets of Berlin. The sound design is top notch as well with explosions rumbling your sub-woofer if you have one to the soldiers shouting at each other across the battlefield it’s great immersion and it feels like you are there.

There is multiplayer either competitive or cooperative the competitive multiplayer is fun with the addition of tanks which mixed things up a bit; it had the usual weapon loadouts and attachments. This is World War II so there are few attachments you can have a grenade launcher at the end of your M1 Garand or you can have a flamethrower as back up. I would not recommend playing it these days because it’s riddled with hackers which isn’t fun because it is a shame the game is a lot of fun. The zombie mode was fun at the time, but if you know me I’m fed up with the whole zombie aspect where they will insert it into popular culture when they’ve ran out of ideas.

Call of Duty: World at War is a fantastic game and was a great swan song to the World War II shooter when people were moving onto modern warfare. If you haven’t played it go get it! It’s cheap and easy to find on Xbox 360 and PS3.