Review Code Provided By Developer
It’s 2017 and it has been a long time coming but the Activision published Call of Duty series has returned to World War II. The last time the series went back to World War II was in Treyarch’s 2008’s offering. However this time Call of Duty: World War II developed by Sledgehammer we go back to the Western front. For those that don’t know the Call of duty series is a first person shooter. This version of the game is the fourteenth Call of Duty game in the main series. How does this game stack up with previous Call of Duty titles and how does it treat the subject manor it’s based on ? Is this the return to form many Call of Duty players have been waiting for ?
Single Player
Let’s start with the single player potion of the game as I know some are only interested in that portion of the game and will never touch the multiplayer. So Call of Duty World War II puts you in the boots of Ronald “Red” Daniels in the 1st Infantry Division who fight their way through D-Day and across the Rhine. There are a total of 11 missions and each mission takes about 30 -40 minutes to complete. I completed the entire campaign on Regular difficulty in about 6 hours. After completing it I don’t really feel the need to go back and play though it again as I felt there were some glaring issues with it and these issues I realize are subjective so your experience might be different.
We have landing on the beaches of Normandy yet again in a World War II game.
Normandy Landing
While Normandy was very pleasant to look at the first 10 plus minutes of the game felt like I was watching a movie with little bits of me running to the next cut scene while the game forced me to look at specific things. After getting off the boat in a nontraditional way, to be honest many soldiers died this way in real life because of the weight of the gear they carried, but not you, you’re fine and get to “enjoy” a nice little cut scene before finally gaining initial control of your character. After this you run about 20 feet up the beach to a predetermined spot laid out to you by the huge icon in game to have the controls taken away from you yet again just to show you a solider that lost his arms before then being instructed to run up the beach to plant some explosives to assist in the advance. I remember thinking to myself that this would of been a fantastic movie but for a game it is just kind of lame. This is the theme that continues with me for the remainder of the entire campaign.
You might be thinking to yourself “wait it doesn’t get better after the Normandy landing?” and I would tell you it doesn’t.
Beautiful scenery!
Everything in campaign is at odds with the gameplay. On one hand you have these beautiful cut scenes that are interesting to look at because you think “that’s what it could of really looked liked back then” but outside of that awe it just feels like they are trying to force you to feel something for these characters.
Another instance of “this is what it could of looked like” back then.
Speaking of characters I guess is a good time to mention that you are part of a squad of men and while I know I’m supposed to remember their names and connect with them in some meaningful way I just didn’t. You have the guy with glasses (Drew Stiles) who you learn in the opening scene wants to chronicle the war and take pictures of his experience.
Drew Stiles
That got me thinking that maybe I’ll be taking pictures with his camera and that it would tie into the game somehow. Perhaps being asked to take photos of landscapes, atrocities, other soldiers or something that made the fact that he brings up he has a camera relevant to the player. Other then at the end of the game where another character asks him to take photos of the atrocities of the work camp you come across, I completely forgot he even had a camera the entire game. As I was writing this section to make sure I got the name of the character correct I ended up on the Call of Duty wiki page for him and literally all it says is “Private Drew Stiles is a character in Call of Duty: WWII. He is part of the 1st Infantry Division”. The only other thing on the entire page about Stiles is what he does to directly affect gameplay. Each character can give you different items during a mission. Stiles for instance gives you grenades. It feels a lot like Bioshock mechanics and can be helpful for extra health packs, but it’s just as shallow as the characters. I feel like this really puts into perspective how poorly fleshed out these characters are. You spend pretty much the entire game with this guy and you know nothing about him. Does he have a wife ? Does he have siblings also in the war ? I just find it so insulting to the player that these characters you spend time with are so one dimensional.
Robert Zussman (left) and Ronald “Red” Daniels (right)
The other two guys in your squad. For some reason you only have four people in your squad even though in real life the US Army squads during this time comprised of 12 men. Anyways the two other people besides Stiles are Robert Zussman and Frank Aiello.
Frank Aiello
Aiello is another character with no depth. According to the wiki all we know is he is from Queens, New York and that’s it. It’s quite disappointing because I wanted to care about these other men in my squad. They are well voice acted and you can tell they motion captured actors to portray them but none of that really matters. The character with the most depth is Robert Zussman. Now the only real reason I can gather we know more about him is because part of the plot revolves around him thus it makes sense for him to have some back story. I’ll be spoiling some of the story so if you don’t want to know what happens, feel free to skip past it.
Translate to “headquarters”
Now in real life POWs that were even just suspected to be Jewish by their German captors were sent off to concentration camps, specifically Buchenwald. Now this was specific to the 70th Infantry Division and not the 1st Infantry Division that you are a part of in the campaign so this could be the reason for the difference. However it doesn’t really sit well with me that they decided to make sure that this was a “work camp” and not a concentration camp because it felt like they side stepped a huge part of history and it felt like the game was saying “we don’t want to touch that”.
“work camp” photos.
So besides the extremely shallow characters the campaign feels very much on rails and in some parts literally so. It feels like you’re just moving from one cut scene to the next and the game play is an inconvenience the developers have to work around. Each level has some sort of “wow” moment that it tries to get you to go “oh wow that is so cool” with little to no success on me. It felt hallow and it was supposed to be my reward for shooting enough dumb AI Germans in the face. Each mission for the most part clearly illustrates your objective with a rather hard to miss HUD icon so that you’re never lost or confused throughout the level. To be fair there aren’t really many options to get lost or confused, as I said the levels are very linear and that feeds into each gameplay section feeling like a chore the developers had to work around in order to get to the next cut scene they want you to watch.
As for level design in the campaign the environments looked beautiful and did a good job of hiding map boundaries. However during development of the single player missions it feels like someone was given a checklist and they had to make sure that there was one of each type of level in the game. You have the Normandy mission, the sniper mission, the train mission, the infiltration mission, the liberate France mission, the tank mission and the flying a plane mission.
Sniper Mission
Plane Mission
I need to also point out here that the tank mission has such poor controls in regards to you controlling the tank that it doesn’t even go in the direction you want. This mission was so frustrating that I almost gave up on the game because it felt like the tank controls were broken. For many of the missions and they are so short and feel so compartmentalized that it’s hard to remember what happened previously and how it ties into the current mission.
The campaign falls flat on its face to me and that was the one aspect of the game I was holding out hope that they got right and made it interesting. With the historical inaccuracies and overall uninspired missions that felt to me like the developers were just checking boxes and I can’t say I was impressed or enjoyed it at all.
Multiplayer
Alright so now that we got what I think of the Campaign out of the way. Let’s turn our attention to where I imagine many people will end up spending the most of their game time, the online multiplayer. Now this is my personal perspective from someone who hasn’t “owned” a Call of Duty title in a while so my experience in multiplayer isn’t based on previous Call of Duty titles and is only based on what I expected and wanted from this games multiplayer and things I would of liked to see differently.
Let’s get the different game modes out of the way first because there are a lot of them and frankly I don’t think many of them are very good. Some of them actively ruin my experience of the game and extrapolate some of the core gameplay issues. So here are the game modes: Team Deathmatch, Domination, Free-for-All · Gridiron, Search and Destroy, Hardpoint, Capture the Flag, Kill Confirmed , Mosh Pit and War Mode.
Standard Gamemodes
There is also Hardcore variants of some of these modes that change the health pool, remove the HUD and makes you die a lot quicker.
Hardcore Modes
I’ve tried most of the game modes, including Hardcore variants and I have to say without a question in my mind the only game mode that’s worth playing and that may keep me playing the multiplayer past the initial experience is War Mode.
War Mode pits two teams of 6 verse 6 each other in objective based “mission”. This mode is quite interesting because it requires teamwork and has multiple objectives per section of the map. So for Operation Neptune the allied team is tasked with assaulting the beach and capturing bunkers after that is completed then they must destroy equipment inside a bunker. Once the allies complete that objective they are onto the final objective of destroying artillery pieces. The Germans are tasked with stopping the Allies from completing the each objective. After the round ends the teams switch sides. This is the most interesting and rewarding mode to play because you are rewarded for teamwork and each game is unique. The game shipped with a total of three War Mode maps and they are separate maps from the other modes. The disappointing part here is that there are only three and I can only hope that more are coming quickly to extend my time in the multiplayer.
Now onto the brass tax. The thing everyone seems to want to know most about in regards to multiplayer. What type of customization is there and what does the progression system look like ? Let us start off broadly and get more specific as I explain. When you first boot up multiplayer you’re asked to select a Division.
Airborne Division Preview Video
There are five divisions to select from: Armored, Mountain, Expeditionary, Infantry and Airborne.
Division Progression and abilities
Each of these divisions grant you specific perks. For instance the Infantry division grants you a bayonet for any rifle automatically. As you use this division in game you gain experience for it and you can rank up your divisions through playing. Rank 1 for the Infantry Division gives you a rifle bayonet as I mentioned above. For Rank 2 you’re given “Additional Primary Attachment” for your primary gun. Rank 3 gives you extra magazines and rank 4 allows you to move significantly faster while aiming down sights. You can also prestige your division to unlock one special weapon for each division. The Infantry Division gives you access to the SVT-40 upon Prestige.
Mountain Prestige Weapon
So now that we got the Division system out of the way we can look at what other customization are available for your solider. Let’s start with weapons because that is what you will spend most of your time looking at or though.
Rifle Selection
SMG Selection
LMG Selection
Shotgun Selection
Sidearms
Melee
There are 29 different weapons in the game, including 5 that are locked behind Division prestige. These weapons represent four different nations so you get a bit of variety with weapon selection in that regard. Each of these weapons allow for a few different attachments you can equip onto your gun so you can get different weapon behavior and scopes on some of them.
You can also equip basic training ribbons to each class. Only one per class though. Each ribbon allows for a specific trait to be applied to your class. For instance there is one ribbon that allows you to take into battle two primary weapons. Some of the ribbons are vastly game changing in my opinion and others are small buffs to call-in timers or being able to take in a rocket launcher instead of a pistol. Considering there are only three pistols to choose from at launch it’s best to try and bring something else instead.
Examples of training ribbons:
Inconspicuous Basic Training
Undercover Basic Training
The last game changing item you can bring into battle are grenades. There are four tactical grenades. Ranging from very useful smoke grenade in War Mode to a poison gas grenade. You also have access to lethal grenades. These include the MK2 frag grenade and the S-mine 44 and throwing knifes and TNT. Four of the 5 classes allow you to bring only one grenade per load out so made sure you choose wisely.
MK2 Frag
S-Mine 44
N 74 ST Anti- tank grenade
I feel I should also mention kill streaks at some point because they are in the game and they affect gameplay directly. However on that same note I don’t have a whole of experience with them because the main mode I played, War Mode, have them disabled. When I was playing other modes I did not live long enough to be able to use them so I can’t really speak to how good they are. They seem to be World War II version of previous ones.
Scorestreaks
Alright we made it through the part of the customization’s that directly affect the game play. There are three primary ways to customize your class beyond selecting what weapon to bring to battle with you. You can put custom camouflage and paint jobs on your weapons. You can completely turn your gun into a tree like stick. All of these camouflages make the guns look utterly ridiculous and extremely unrealistic and silly. Quite disappointing coming from a game that was trying to market itself as realistic and authentic.
Custom Camouflage
You can also apparently get paint jobs for guns and while those are not available at the time of writing they at least appear to let you make more realistic weapon skins.
Paint jobs that could be promising in regards to realistic skins.
After weapon skins you can select different uniforms for each specific Division. I can’t stress this part enough, in terms of limiting uniforms to specific Divisions because I’d love to run around with a US pilot uniform and get the sniper rifle division perks.
Instead if the uniform is restricted to the airborne division than it’s best to use the weapons the divisions are supposed to use so you can get the most out of each weapon and Division. There are 42 extra Uniforms to unlock and use to customize your solider in order to show off in the Headquarters shared world area.
Headquarters Map
The Headquarters functions as a hub and feels very much like it’s straight from an MMO game, for better or worse. It is nice to see the Normandy beach after the initial D-Day landing but other than giving you someplace to mindless run around and challenge people to 1v1’s for bragging rights it’s pretty pointless.
Select your own daily missions.
You can get get daily missions and weekly missions from Headquarters and while it’s kind of neat to be able to choose your own daily missions so you can pick ones you’re more likely to finish so you can get those sweet loot boxes it’s still just an interactive menu.
So you may be wondering to yourself “wow some of this seems cool, I wonder how you acquire all this cool stuff”. If you thought to yourself that you would complete the daily missions and then use the in game currency you acquire to buy the items you want to customize yourself, you’d be half right and mostly wrong. You can talk to the Quartermaster and buy parts of collections that are required to unlock the big item of the collection.
One of the collections you can complete.
You’re encouraged to open loot boxes to acquire items. These loot boxes fast track the process of completing collections by straight up giving you specific items that you then don’t have to spend your in game currency on.
Loot box haul. Most of them are like this, useless items.
So this is where the game really takes the piss with getting on the loot box trend that we have seen so prevalent in 2017. These loot boxes drop from the sky magically for you and everyone else on the Headquarters map to see. These items from what I can tell are just items from the collection for the time being (I’m told there are special weapons and skins you can only get from boxes but I’ve yet to see any or get any myself) and the tone and manor it how they are presented that just feels like a giant middle finger to the player. The game doesn’t respect your time and making the rewards you get from your time in the game completely random. I also need to add in here that there is no way to preview you what you got in a loot box. You can’t click on any thing to preview or equip the items you get, you have to go into yet another menu to see the new items. It’s quite insulting and quite an annoying trend in gaming these days. I’ve also heard you will be able to buy loot boxes with real money on the 14th of November but don’t have confirmation on that. On top of it insulting the players time the loot box dropping just looks utterly out of place and really does a disservice to the setting and the historical context.
So the multiplayer section of the game is where most of the meat is and it shows with their yearly treadmill. It adds the loot boxes because everyone else does and regurgitates game modes from previous iterations in the series. After playing almost to max level at least once, I’ve quickly learned that the weapon unlock tiers make early weapons such as the M1 Grand completely useless. It actively puts you at a disadvantage to use the rifles compared to using something like an SMG or STG 44. I was really hoping to be able to use this iconic rifle for more then the first few levels but it was detrimental to performing well to keep using it over the STG 44. The only good mode in the multiplayer is the War Mode and even that has a shortage of maps. I’d like to see more War Mode maps and perhaps even a hard core mode for it. Those two things would extend the life of the multiplayer frenzy for sure.
Zombies
This Call of Duty also has a zombies mode that plays very similar to previous zombie modes in other Call of Duty games. Other people more experience than me with Zombies have told me that this is much better than previous versions of the game mode and I’m inclined to believe them. I got though the opening tutorial mission and jumped online expecting something new and fresh and it was like every other zombie game I’ve played in recent years. You run around open doors, buy guns and ammo in an attempt to shoot enough zombies so that you can complete the objectives. Personally I’m not a fan of zombie game modes and since it only has one rather large map I would not base my entire purchase of the game based on the Zombie mode.
Photo by: RexVex via Steam – Used with permission
Photo by: RexVex via Steam – Used with permission
Graphics
We have covered the gameplay and game modes let’s get into the graphics. I’ll start out by saying that the environments in this game are frankly beautiful. This game does a great job of creating some extremely beautiful scenery and really takes you back to what it could of been. I was awestruck a few times with how spectacular specific campaign missions looked. The multiplayer maps while looking good are so compact and small it’s hard to enjoy them let alone take it in. As far as game performance on my setup I struggled to keep 60 FPS with everything maxed out so I had to turn down a few settings. There are some poor textures on the map like one of a cardboard box that I think could be better but over I don’t think the game looks “ugly” or bad in any regard. Overall it’s a good looking game set during the second world war. I’ll leave you with some screenshots taken in game as a reference.
Sounds
The sounds in this game are very inconsistent. On one hand you have some decent enough explosion sounds and on the other hand the weapons all sound weak , bland and boring. While streaming the game I was asked if all the guns sounded the same because to that person they did. They do sound unique but for instance the STG 44 just infuriates me with its sound because it just sounds so weak like a pea shooter. It’s this inconsistent sound design that really makes the sound passable in my book. If I could run some mods that made the sounds more realistic I would in a heartbeat and I’m extremely disappointed that while they got the M1 Garand ping noise correct the gun itself just sounds weak. I don’t really expect to many people to be upset with the sound as they are passable they just aren’t as amazing as they could of been.
Historical Inaccuracy
This is a huge topic for me because I’m someone who appreciates history and likes to see things properly represented in my video games, especially when they have the budget available to do so. So when a game that is marketed to have a historically correct campaign and shows off development diaries that claim that this game will be historically accurate and yet spits in the face of the subject manor it’s based on makes me quite an unhappy gamer.
This game starts off with have PPSH Russian sub-machine guns in the bunkers on the D-Day landing.
PPSH on the beach of Normandy.
From what I can gather this wasn’t common and most people would assume that this is entirely inaccurate. Let’s just say for the sake of discussion that this did in fact happen at least once and the developers felt the need to put it in the game. This is only the start of a campaign and a game that takes a monumental opportunity to teach a new generation about a huge conflict in history and instead throws it all out the window because they really don’t seem to care about history at all.
One glaring example to me that I mentioned in my experience with the beta is the game having reflex sights in a time before reflex sights even existed. It’s this type of abysmal attention to detail that not only takes me out of the immersion and experience but also makes me wonder why they even chose World War II as a setting to begin with. It doesn’t feel like they “did it right” it feels like they took the setting and then tried to modernize it with attachments that weren’t even invented yet.
Another issue with the game in regards to history is that none of the guns have any recoil. Now many would claim this is because of gameplay but I’d claim that they took away any personality the guns have. They all feel the same in regards to recoil and thus takes away what game some of the weapons uniqueness and identity. I realize this won’t get changed but having more realistic bullet spread and recoil would go a long way in creating a more unique,challenging, and immersive experience.
My third big issue with historical inaccuracy is specific weapons. Rifles that use stripper clips for reloading and they have 6 rounds in the gun and the player puts another stripper clip in the gun thus trying to put 11 total rounds in a gun that holds 10. I’m of course referring to the Lee Enfield. There is no reason this type of thing needs to happen. There are a few other extremely annoying weapons that either did not exist or are using models that weren’t used in the time period the game takes place. The KAR98K depicted in the game is the one from WWI and would not of been used very much during June of ’44 so why they chose that model to use seems really weird. As it turns out the base model for the KAR98K is the original WWI version but the one you can get in a loot box is the 1939 version and has the rounded front sight. Seems kind of sleazy to me. These are things that did not have to be wrong but yet they are. It goes back to them taking a subject manor and then throwing it out the window like they could not care less about the source material.
Final Thoughts
Call of Duty: World War II was slated as a return to form. Between the development diaries and the promotional material I was under the impression at the very least would have a historically accurate campaign and would stay true to the subject manor. I was ready to feel something for these characters and learn something new about a topic I feel I’m well versed in. I was expecting a return to the days of Call of Duty 2 multiplayer where I could run around with a bolt action scope less rifle and shoot as many people as I could.
Instead we get this game that is half in the present with skin of yesteryear. It pulled me in with its setting and my interest in the time period and took that expectation and destroyed it. I wanted to like this game, I thought with the big budget we would not see such silly errors in gun reload animations and would have a huge weapon selection to chose from. This is far from the truth and it continues to illustrate this over arching experience I seem to have from this game. This game wants to continue to cater to a younger audience and to those people that don’t have any interest in learning about real life events. I mean it removes the swastika from the multiplayer maps and I think I know why. It’s because this game doesn’t take place in during World War II like it suggests, it takes place in some fairy tale land where nothing bad happens and learning something from video games means you’re making the game wrong. If this truly was the World War II game the promotional material and pre-release videos then I could see being upset about the lack of the swastika. It’s not though and never will be. This game could of taught people something, it could of told a story that was meaningful and dealt directly with issues that real people experienced. Instead though it didn’t. It’s yet another arcade game with enemies spawning behind you in Team Deathmatch, weapons that could be any other gun in the world except that the exterior looks like a gun from World War II and spits on the source material. As someone who has been waiting for a return to form, an improvement to the series that propelled my interest in history and intrigued me to learn something new about human history, this game is a disgrace. It doesn’t care about history, it doesn’t care about telling an interesting story, all it really cares about is children opening loot boxes and making sure their campaign checked all the boxes. To that I ask the developers at Sledgehammer, why ? Why did you take such an iconic setting with such rich history and turn it into a modern version of duck hunter ? I can’t answer that question myself. I want to believe that at least some people on the development team cared about the source material but if they did, I missed where it shows. It pains me to be so utterly disgusted by a game I was really hoping would turn my view on the Call of Duty franchise around. In the end though it just concretes the idea that they type of World War II game I want to play isn’t made by big publishers, it’s made by indie developers.
This one sentence I feel like summarizes my thoughts as a whole on the game: It’s one of the least enjoyable games I’ve played a quite a long time, but it’s a decent Call of Duty game. That speaks to just how far Call of Duty has fallen. I hope Call of Duty the best of luck in the future because I think it’s going to need it.
