ANSWER THE CALL TO ACTION
ONCE upon a time in World War II, an American soldier pretty much single-handedly invaded occupied Europe, killed all the Nazis, learned a valuable lesson about brotherhood, un-Nazified the world forever, and then went back to his farm in Nowheresville, Texas to marry his fiancee.
That’s broadly the plot of most of the US World War II movies and computer games of late and Activision’s latest first-person shooter game, Call of Duty: World War II follows that formula so closely it’s only an absent “Blow up the Nazi Superweapon” mission away from a Ctrl-C/ Ctrl-V of the whole thing.
Developed by Sledgehammer Games and published by Activision on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Call of Duty: World War II is really two and a half separate games. The first one is the story of Private “Red” Daniels and his squadmates as they machinegun their way across occupied Europe in the later stages of World War II en route to Berlin, and the second is the multiplayer game, and then you’ve got the return of Zombies mode.
The story mode is visually spectacular but the story itself was, I thought, mostly trite, cliched, uninspired, inaccurate, and illogical.
Over the course of the campaign, your character performs countless feats of heroism and derring-do, to the point where they would likely need a wheelbarrow to cart all their Medals of Honour, Victoria Crosses, Croix De Guerres and assorted other accolades back home.
While most of the campaign is Americanfocused, one excellent mission had you sneaking into a German HQ as a female French Resistance member, providing a welcome change of focus and playing style.
Despite trying for an air of authenticity, I thought the developers dropped the ball in some areas, particularly the weapons — some of them are shown working in a way that’s fundamentally different to their real-life counterparts.
Having said that, the gameplay aspects of the single-player campaign are solid, the action is frenetic, and there’s some good performances from Josh Duhamel as your squad’s sergeant. Some of the set pieces are impressive too, so it’s worth playing through at least once and treating it as a 10-hour long action movie rather than a serious attempt at recreating World War II.
On paper, COD: World War II has a lot going for it and I should really enjoy it, but it just didn’t tick all the boxes I was after.
If you just want to run around a WWII-themed environment and shoot people online then COD: WWII is not a bad game, but it’s not groundbreaking either.
If you’re a long-time fan there’s going to be plenty of appeal here, but if you want a historically-themed FPS then Battlefield 1 is, in my opinion, a better game.