It’s not like challenge in a game is a bad thing, but it’s simply unrefined and vulgar to throw bullets and bombs at a player and deign to call it challenging.
The single player campaign is, in essence, a grenade throwing sim. This of course means Martyrdom, which of course means even more grenades. The grenade situation isn’t helped by the fact that enemies now have perks in single player. Grenades will account for about 80% of player death in the single player campaign, if not more. A particular checkpoint even spawned me on top of one. They seem to randomly appear, even in really improbable locations, sometimes one after the other in quick succession, and will always pop up if you dare to use cover for anything longer than thirty seconds. If you thought grenades were annoying in Modern Warfare, prepare yourself for a laugh riot, because grenades this time around are ridiculous. Sometimes it’s because an enemy snuck up and hit you, but more often than not you simply won’t know how you died and will be left scratching your head wondering what the hell just happened. There are times when, without even any indication that health has been lost, you’ll suddenly just die. The unique algorithm of CoD titles whereby enemies constantly respawn until the player reaches key areas has always been slightly jarring, but the game assaults you with bullets from so many angles, often from enemies that can’t even be found, that Treyarch has almost parodied the entire fundamentals of the series.
There really isn’t a better way to describe it, but the single player actually redefines stupidity in game design. This isn’t helped by the fact that the single player campaign is, quite frankly, stupid. Only at the very end does the game approach anything that feels personal and interesting, but it’s way too little, way too late. The game almost cynically attempts to recapture the shocking and dramatic moments of Modern Warfare at times, but the characters and events are so vaguely distinguished that you are never compelled to care. Unlike the previous title, there aren’t really any interesting characters or a sense of plot outside of what actually happened in WWII. If there is a story in World at War, it doesn’t come across very well. Switching between a US Marine and a Russian Private, you will play two stories and fight against both the Japanese and German forces. World at War takes us back to the series’ roots of World War II, this time changing things up by setting it in both the Pacific conflict and the fall of Germany. Imagine the dismay of gamers everywhere then, when it looked like Treyarch was going to play it safe and set the follow up title back in World War II.ĭoes Call of Duty: World at War prove the critics wrong and show that Treyarch can do just as great a job with the franchise as Infinity Ward, or is it just another World War II game that does nothing to make its mark? Read on for the official review …Ĭall of Duty: World at War (PC, PS3, Xbox 360 ) Infinity Ward had done an excellent job with a game that not only provided addictive multiplayer, but an engaging and sometimes shocking single player campaign that truly distinguished it from other war shooters. It was one of the biggest releases of its year, critically acclaimed and popular enough to knock Halo 3 from the top spot of Xbox Live’s most played titles. It was, in fact, the title that made me truly care about online gaming, thanks to its fast-paced “meat grinder” style of play and fantastic promotion system. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is easily my most played game of 2007.