Call of Duty: World at War

NOTE: This review is only for the single player portion of Call of Duty World at War, and is scored accordingly. Please take that into account when reading this piece. Thank you.

The Call of Duty franchise has been a staple of the first person shooter genre this decade, starting out life as a PC exclusive before entering the console wars for the second iteration. With four numbered games and a half dozen spin-offs behind it, Call of Duty returns with World at War. The same formula that has been present since the first game is here in spades with almost no alteration or innovation to speak of. This is Call of Duty through and through, and though the formula works as well now as it did five years ago, it is starting to feel a bit long in the tooth.

Call of Duty World at War features more Call of Duty cliches than I care to count. The game starts with your character being rescued from execution by former comrades, proceeds to a beach storming in which your boat is destroyed on the way in and your captain has to pull you ashore, then sends you off to Stalingrad where you are pulled from amongst your fallen friends to continue the fight against the Nazis. Throughout the game you will assault bunkers, plant C4 on mortars, mount machine guns, take control of an assault plane, command a tank, snipe an enemy general, and much more. It all sounds incredibly varied and exciting, and it would be, had all this not been present in the series since the very first game. It's not that the game is terribly broken, although I did encounter several game breaking bugs, and it's not even that it isn't fun, it's just that the same thing is only fun for so long.

If you've played any of the other games on 360 you'll be right at home in World at War. Each level starts with a description of the battle at hand, after which you are dropped into an epic firefight, which just doesn't seem as impressive as it used to. You'll find a good twenty teammates and equally as many enemies battling around you, while planes drop bombs from overhead, mortars pound your positions, tanks duel in the background, and buildings crumble in spectacular fashion. It all seems great until the classic problems just start rearing their ugly heads. And honestly they just seem a little more noticeable now than before. Enemies, like always, will continuously respawn out of nowhere until you reach some trigger that causes them to randomly disappear. AI is completely scripted and will utterly break if taken out of routine, and the environment is only destructible in small dedicated chunks. Your allies will help you only when they are supposed to; normally you'll have to take out every enemy yourself. You are a master at most any weapon found on the battlefield regardless of origin, and, of course, merely looking down the sights of a gun will lock you onto the body of your target. Yes this is Call of Duty without a doubt, but it's Call of Duty going through the motions, and without the weight and depth of the modern setting, this franchise feels more dated than ever before.

World at War uses Modern Warfare's engine to power the game, and as such it looks and feels pretty dated. While some engines manage to hold up well even years later, this year has been such a banner year for improved technology that the weak textures, lack of interactivity, and loss of color seems very 2007. Treyarch attempted to spruce things up with the inclusion of the flamethrower on the Japanese front. Given infinite ammo and an impressive range, the flamethrower is by far the best weapon in the game and a great addition to the Call of Duty formula. Players can burn their foes to death, and the environment will burn along with them. If Far Cry 2 hadn't done propagating fire much better earlier this year the effect would be rather impressive. While fire in that game spread like one would expect fire to, in this game is is constricted, burning down trees and plants, but not spreading like one would expect from "propagating" fire. Still, the weapon is fun to use, and being the only new addition to the game other than the Japanese setting, it is successful at adding a little something unique to this incredibly cliche title.

In addition to the fire in the game not really acting like fire is supposed to, it doesn't really look like fire is supposed to either. In fact, the water in the game, as well as the grass, trees, and character models, all look pretty week. Even the notoriously bad Gambryo engine used in Fallout 3 managed to render characters more realistically than this game. On the other hand, the characters are voiced rather well, with the character's direct superiors sounding very convincing. The rest of the game though, again, sound like every other game in the series. The German MP30 assault rifle looks and sounds the same in this game as it has for the past five years. Maybe the sample rate is higher, or the textures more detailed, but honestly, this gun, like the rest of the game, is the same as always.

Call of Duty World at War is a game that goes through the motions. It never tries to transcend the series it is contained in. It never tries to be anything more than Modern Warfare in WWII, and because of its modest aspirations it succeeds in all of them. But honestly, Call of Duty has been around for years, and with a new game released every single year, the series is really starting to become a case of been there done that. This review could go into detail about individual aspects or levels of the game, but anyone who is interested in this game has almost definitely played the games that came before it, and so know exactly what they're getting. If you're new to Call of Duty, or even if you jumped on the boat with Modern Warfare, then World at War may seem exiting or even fresh. For those of us who have been playing the series since its inception though, it's safe to say that we deserve something more than what we got this year with Call of Duty World at War.