by: Noah Hess

December 03, 2008

Treyarch has some rather large shoes to fill with Call of Duty: WaW after Infinity Wards Call of Duty 4 received high critical success last year. Treyarch’s previous attempt, Call of Duty 3, was not the great game many expected from the franchise. Though that game was a rushed development cycle with less then a year in development, the new offering has had a 2 year development cycle and the game carries the Call of Duty name with pride.

The game as you probably know has gone from the modern warfare setting back to WW2. This may have some people doubting if the game will be as good as CoD4 since the guns are now, for lack of a better word, shitty. At least in comparison to the guns we grew so accustomed to in the modern setting. The game however uses the same engine as CoD4, so think of it as more or less the same game with a new environment and some upgrades like co-op, new multiplayer game types and new maps.

The gameplay is the same as CoD4 so you will be able to jump right in if you are coming over from that game. If you are new to the CoD series, it is one of the top games in the First Person Shooter genre.

Since there are two major components of this series, single player and multiplayer, lets break this down into two separate sections.

The main campaign has you starting out as a U.S. Marine fighting on the pacific front, an area of WW2 not yet touched by the Call of Duty franchise. You start out in the level Makin Atoll, being saved by Sgt. Roebuck (voice by Kiefer Sutherland) and falling under his command. As you progress through these missions you will find that the Japanese soldiers fight differently then the Nazis we grew so close to. They will lie in grassy areas in ambush and have snipers set up in trees. The biggest change is that they like to rush you and try and bayonet you like crazy. This also brings about the use of the flamethrower. The flamethrower is required in a few missions where you have to burn enemies out of trees and bunkers. It brings some mixture to the gameplay and a new element of realism.

When not on the Pacific front you will be playing as Demitri, a Russian soldier that is fighting for his life and the lives of his comrades. The first mission with him is similar to the ‘sniper’ mission in CoD4. You follow around Sgt. Reznov as he guides you through the ruins of Stalingrad to ultimately snipe a high ranking Nazi officer. I felt that the missions you play as with Demitri feel the most ‘epic’ out of the two playable characters. The one problem is that almost every mission starts out with you almost dead, after a while it doesn’t deliver the same emotional feeling anymore.

The levels in the campaign are very well layed out, though a few spots will be sure to piss you off if you are playing on veteran. There are missions where you run through Japanese bunkers with a flamethrower burning the enemies out of them. Missions where you are fighting in a subway station as the lights are turning off and on and the ground is shaking from artillery strikes. There is even a mission where you get to be the gunner of a U.S. plane destroying ships and shooting down enemy planes. The gameplay is carried over from previous CoD games and remains almost perfect. The only problem I ran into was the guns and hit detection being off a little sometimes, but then I remembered that these were World War II guns and not the M16 and other guns I grew so used to in CoD4.

The campaign this time around also offers another first for the Call of Duty series with co-op play, either locally or on Xbox Live. It is such a good addition that I hope Infinity Ward uses it for their next game in the series. Playing with friends always increases the fun factor of a game 10 fold, and being able to play with up to 4 people at a time is a lot of fun. The game kind of borrows from Halo 3’s competitive co-op and has some very similar features. You have a score which builds up based on kills and how you kill someone. If you get enough kills within a certain time limit you will get a score multiplier. They also have ‘death cards’ which you can find throughout the campaign and collect to use in the multiplayer, they are essentially the same thing as the skulls in Halo 3 and will modify the game depending on the card you activate. The only problem with the co-op when playing locally it will split the screen into 4 quadrants, even if you only have 2 players. Hopefully they will fix it through a patch, but for now it’s kind of frustrating. If you play on xbox live though you will not have to worry about it as your screen doesn’t split at all.