Did you ever notice that Call of Duty: World at War really isn't as great as the reviewers said it is, or great at all for that matter? Among the many problems with the game, one of the biggest is that the guys at Treyarch who made World at War, or as I've recently coined, Cod War, just don't get what made Cod Four so successful. Let me start with what you're hit with right when you step into the campaign. Cutscenes. Infinity Ward understands how to tell a story effectively in a videogame, using the Half-Life 2 approach and never including cutsenes. What it also does is start you out in a non-lethal bootcamp session where, 1. you can learn to play the game effectively and without frustrating situations and 2. you learn about your allies enough to let you care about them. See, Cod 4 was smart about its storytelling because it gave you a small amount of guys to care about and then fleshed them out to the point that you do really care. You have Gaz, whose smart-ass personality immediatly stands out in the training mission, Captain Price, whose eccentric mustache and unique hat is enough by itself to allow you to know which guy he is, and later Captain McMillan, who is such a nice and encouraging guy while teaching you that you really want him to make it out during the close call you go through after your assassinatio attempt. Yeah there are guys on the American side but you're not really supposed to like them, they're just characterized as gung-ho generic American soldiers. Well I guess Griggs. OK I take it back. You care about, or at least take note of Griggs because he's the token black guy who puts on rap music as soon as he finds a CD player. These guys never ONCE have a stupid, tired-ass monologue about how their men are their 'brothers' and all that shit like Kiefer Sutherland does in War. You just respect them for their personalities and the way they treat you and everyone they come in contact with. They have a history, as displayed in the superb flashback mission that makes you care even more about Captain Price and his thirty-year hunt for Zakhaev and even more backstory is referenced when Gaz and Price are talking about the Russian soldiers they get to help them. Call of Duty 4's singleplayer was a masterpiece partly because of the way it makes you care for its characters and the finale only proves that. In Cod War you aren't introduced to the characters at all, and you can hardly even tell which one Kiefer Sutherland is without looking for his lips (hardly) being synced to the dialogue. This problem shows itself even more when one of the superior officers dies near the start and it's supposed to be surprising. Whoa I totally knew who that guy was and on top of that, I knew that he was a superior. It makes no impact whatsoever when that happens, and it completely deflates the edgy "Hey we're so super unpredictable anyone could die at any time" vibe the game was obviously so desperately trying to give off. It's disturbing how little they learned from that EXACT same thing in Call of Duty 3 when the plane crashed into the house you're in at the end of the first mission. It may have been unpredictable, but that doesn't mean I knew about these characters enough in the first place to care what happens to them.

Getting back to the original point, Cod War comes right out with a cutscene with a narration about the war and why it's bad and my men are tired and waaa waaa waaa. Call of Duty 4 never had a cutscene. The only non-interactive parts in the game were the loading screens meant to be a briefing from Captain Price directly to his men. He is still talking to you and there are no frills attached. Not a cutscene. Cod War , while being similar in showing only footage of people and not showing your characters on loading screens, just has a bunch of kinetic typography with narration. Both games may only include only text and reels of footage during those parts but they're completely different. Cod Four was still addressing you as your character, keeping you in its full immersion. Cod War is just a simple narration about war and how the battle was going. It wasn't to your character, it was to you. The player. This completely breaks the immersion. You can tell that Cod War was trying to do what Cod Four did when they completely ripped off the ACT-130 Gunship part, showing you what plane you're going to ride in while going over the specs of the guns and how many people it can hold. It's just not the same. Everything about Cod War feels like it's a little boy following in its big brother's footsteps while he's away but doesn't quite understand what it's doing or why it's doing it. The storytelling is a mess. The Russian campaign, ironically, is much better than the American one, since more story goes on through the player's eyes and the characters are introduced in ways that allow you to remember them better. I still think the part of the Russian campaign ripped straight from "Enemy At The Gates" where you're in the pile of dead bodies and have to assassinate the German leader was the best part in the whole game. Too bad its peak (which was about as half as high as Cod Four's peak, if that) was right at the start of the game.