A Review of the Single Player Experience
Call of Duty: World at War thrusts players back into the familiar setting of WWII, although shifts some of the action from the familiar European theatre over to the Pacific. World at War has received some undeserved criticism right off the bat, simply because of its more successful older cousin.
While it might be easy to write off World at War simply as another World War II game, it should be judged on its own merits and, as a first person shooter, it is fantastic. Treyarch has done a good job of maintaining tension and action across the course of the entire campaign. Each battle is intense enough to fill you with a nice feeling of satisfaction after each one, and checkpoints are close enough together to keep you from starting all over from the beginning. Checkpoints are sometimes inconsistent and don't always register, which can lead to frustration. Overall though, this aspect is handled smoothly.
The Pacfic theatre of war can be genuinely terrifying and makes you realise how much fighting for your life, in the jungle, would have sucked. My only criticism of the combat in the game is the prevalence of grenades. Even when hiding in cover, with a grenade landing on the other side of cover, consider yourself dead. This makes it frustrating as you cannot always throw back these grenades either. NPC's have an irritating tendency of hiding in the same cover, exactly where you are causing a glitch where you get stuck, cannot move and subsequently get exploded. While this sounds like a serious game ruining issue, its occurance over the course of the campaign is minor and insignificant when looking at the game as a whole.
The characters are not overly charismatic, and while an attempt is made to give you a connection to them, something just doesn't sit quite right. In saying that however, they are not awful characters who you want to kill yourself, they are just, well, there.
If you are looking for a solid 7-8 hour campaign experience that provided great shooting action then World at War is definitley worth a look at. If you are just looking for a single player experience, give this game a hire and you should be able to power through it. Don't hate this just because you LOVE Call of Duty 4. IF you love Call of Duty 4, then hire this, enjoy it for what it is and go back to CoD4 multiplayer. Don't miss out on a fun experience simply for the sake of being a hater.
