Call Of Duty: World At War /
FORMAT PS3, PS2 PUB ACTIVISION / DEV TREYARCH (PS3), REBELLION (PS2) / RELEASED 2008
This wasn’t actually Call Of Duty’s first cross-gen release – that honour goes to 2006’s Call Of Duty 3, which also served as a PS3 launch title. However, two years on, you might have assumed the series’ first title that moves into the Black Ops storyline would be a generation exclusive. Instead, World At War would be the final Call Of Duty release for PS2, although it wasn’t handled by Treyarch but outsourced to Rebellion, which developed it using its own custom in-house engine, Asura, with this game getting the additional subtitle ‘Final Front’.
Whereas the PS3 version had you play American and Soviet campaigns from the Pacific and East European theatres of war respectively, Final Front’s campaign was totally different, with a new set of characters (although the American soldiers you play as in both versions share the surname Miller). Instead of the Soviets, the European missions saw you playing as a mixture of American and British soldiers during the Battle Of The Bulge as well as taking over Hitler’s birthplace in Austria.
With 13 missions, Final Front was a sizeable campaign, although it was restricted in some ways. For example, its tank mission was on rails rather than free-roaming like on PS3. And that was your lot, as you got none of the multiplayer options, such as co-op, splitscreen, and online multiplayer, that were available on PS3. On PS3 World At War introduced the series staple of a Zombies multiplayer mode, which was missing from the PS2 version.
“On PS3 World At War introduced a series staple: Zombies mode.”
FORMAT PS3, PS2 / PUB KOEI DEV OMEGA FORCE / RELEASED 2008
Despite arriving some months after the PS3 version was released, the PS2 version of this musou entry actually had extra content, in the form of additional characters with different weapons and movesets so that they weren’t just reskins, plus additional levels. These extras, however, weren’t enough to compensate for the fact that the outdated hardware simply couldn’t handle the scale of the enormous battles, with PS2 suffering from lots of heavy slowdown and poorer graphics. Abilities you had on PS3, such as duelling and swimming, were also cut from this port.