My Impressons After a Few Weeks of Playing Call of Duty: World at War

Call Of Duty 4, released just over a year ago, has quickly climbed to the top of the very crowded first-person shooter hill to become one of the most popular games on Xbox Live. Call of Duty: World at War, a sort of half-sequel to CoD 4, brings more of the same experience, but may not make quite the same enormous splash that its predecessor did.

World at War shifts the setting from the modern battlefield of CoD 4 back to the World War II setting that the Call of Duty series was established on. The single player campaign takes an episodic format, putting you in the shoes of an American soldier for roughly one half of the game and a Russian soldier for the other half.

Each level has the same pacing and narrative of a scene from a movie, dropping you into battle situations with little background given, allowing to absorb the story firsthand as the action unfolds around you. Adding to the sense of immersion is the fact that there are no in-game cinematic sequences. Rather, all the special events that happen according to the pre-scripted story occur in real-time. For example, when a bomb goes off next to your character, rendering him incapacitated, there is no sudden loading screen or shift of view. Instead, your character might fall over and be dragged towards the next objective by a fellow soldier while you control only where you look. All of this occurs while the game maintains a first-person view. The seamless nature of these special events keeps things more interesting than most other first-person shooters, which tend to be light on in-game narrative.

World at War’s levels are only loosely related and sometimes seem to take place years apart in the chronology of the war. This gives the game the luxury of putting you into a wide variety of settings, from Japan to Russia to Germany, and ensures that you never get bored of the environments or situations.

Aiding the transitions from level to level are some very well crafted cut scenes, which are narrated, surprisingly, by Keifer Sutherland, who apparently took up videogame voice acting while the writers of 24 were on strike. These cut scenes establish the overall progress of the war, have some very nice stylized, retro graphics and authentic footage from the era, and give you the opportunity to be swept away by Mr. Sutherland’s rugged, gravelly voice. (More on that later.)

World at War’s gameplay and controls are inherited directly from CoD 4. There are different weapons obviously, which are all authentic World War II equipment, but they work just the same as in CoD 4. This is not necessarily a bad thing; CoD 4′s control scheme crammed a surprising number of actions onto the Xbox controller while still remaining intuitive and fast. Once the shallow learning curve for the controls is overcome it is a cinch to make your character bring his gun’s iron sights up to eye level, sprint, throw enemy grenades back or stab opponents. Anyone familiar with CoD 4 will be right at home in World at War.

Unfortunately, World at War also inherits many of the flaws of its predecessor. Navigating terrain, for example, can be very frustrating sometimes. Your character can easily get stuck on door frames or sand bags, and climbing over obstacles tends to be unnecessarily difficult at times. It is not uncommon for you to press A to climb over something only to have your character perform a feeble, ineffective jump, wasting valuable time and leaving you open to enemy fire. With some experience with the peculiar collision detection and character movement system these problems can usually be overcome, but this is no excuse for the sometimes clunky movement physics.

Another problem passed down from CoD 4 is the short length of the single player campaign. CoD 4′s campaign was intense and immersive, but only dished out a few hours of gameplay. World at War is no exception to this flaw, and its campaign can likely be finished in an afternoon. But, just as with its ancestor, the meat of World at War is not its single player campaign; most players will only be interested in World at War specifically for its multiplayer.

This is where the value of World at War becomes somewhat hard to assess. Like with the single player campaign, World at War’s multiplayer gameplay is essentially identical to CoD 4′s. Multiplayer is made up of a selection of different gameplay types, which are mostly team-based, such as Team Deathmatch and the capture-the-flag-like Domination.

Getting kills and accomplishing goals in multiplayer builds experience for your online persona, and as you gain levels you unlock new weapons, weapon add-ons, and perks. This format has been wildly successful for CoD 4, probably because it manages to combine the persistent and addictive progress-based gameplay of massively multiplayer online games with the visceral, instant gratification of a first-person shooter.

World at War mirrors this approach down to every detail, and while it makes for a new set of levels, weapons, gameplay types and accomplishments for players of CoD 4 to dig into, it also results in a multiplayer game that feels a bit derivative. For example, a unique aspects of CoD 4 was that you were rewarded for kill streaks with some powerful, temporary advantages. Three kills gave you a UAV, showing your opponents’ position on the radar, five kills gave an air-strike, and seven kills gave a helicopter that flew around wreaking havoc on anyone not behind cover. These advantages were tailored to the modern setting of  CoD 4, with each one granting advantages that only modern technology could offer.

World at War, on the other hand, tries to cram these same gameplay mechanics into a World War II setting, to strange effect. The UAV is replaced with a recon plane, which can somehow see through roofs to expose your enemies and comes complete with futuristic green scan lines on your radar. Five kills now brings an artillery strike, which is actually very well implemented. But seven kills, the kill count reserved for the most powerful of battlefield weapons, now brings in… dogs. Many, many dogs.

These attack dogs run around the battlefield killing soldiers in two hits, barking as they go, and generally cause more damage than any machinegun ever could. It is a strange experience to play a war game full of explosives, automatic weapons and flamethrowers, only to find that the most feared weapon of all, and the most sought-after weapon for winning a fierce battle, is a pack of dogs. It is forced design decisions such as these and others that give the impression that a lot of World at War’s multiplayer features are tacked on.

Adding to the derivative feeling of World at War’s multiplayer aspects are some of the sound effects. Artillery strikes, while visually well-done, hiss like a band of banshees falling from the sky. This quiet, ghostly sound effect ends up being quite underwhelming, especially when contrasted with the powerful explosions it accompanies.

Finally, Keifer Sutherland’s voice acting, which accompanies you any time you play on the American team, lacks any sense of urgency whatsoever. While at first it is nice to hear a celebrity presence in a videogame, it quickly grows tiresome after the fifteenth time you hear Keifer unenthusiastically blurt out that Charlie has been taken by the enemy.

Despite these problems, World at War is still an undeniably good game, just as, or rather because of, Call of Duty 4. The very fact that I’ve been playing it for about 3 weeks now is proof of that. If you’ve never played Call of Duty 4, or have played loads of it and are jonesing for some new content, it is a no-brainer to pick up. But don’t expect anything ground-breaking or surprising, and if CoD 4 hasn’t already make you a fan of first-person shooters, you should probably pass.