Conclusions

Call of Duty: World at War was always going to be an uphill struggle for Treyarch and not just because the studio is known mainly for making only the inferior games in the Call of Duty series. After Call of Duty 4 moved the series to a more contemporary setting, we’ve really got to question why we’re back in World War II.

The oft-visited and even ofter-revisited World War II genre is getting old and we’re starting to get visibly fatigued by the same-old, same-old formula. We’ve landed on Normandy beach more times than we can count, crawled through Stalingrad too many times to recall and we’ve spent so much time storming French farmhouses that we’ve had to apply for dual-nationality.

Call of Duty: World at War has on one front tried to liven things up a bit by taking things into the Pacific Theatre, but even that change itself is predictable and ill-fated. Half the game may be set in a jungle, but that doesn’t change anything except the number of trees.

Not that World at War is truly dedicated to spicing things up either – the Russian campaign is proof of that.


What we’ve ended up with then is a game which is almost wholly unremarkable in terms of setting. It’s exactly the same combination of night missions and beach landings and war-torn cities that we’ve seen a thousand times before in the earlier games. The only thing that sets it apart is the unusual gore and executions, none of which is handled all that maturely or relevantly.

The scripted segments, plentiful explosions and the sheer adrenaline rush of storming a beach as artillery falls around you like explosive hail – these are the highlights of Call of Duty: World at War and they work just as well as they always did. It’s just a shame that the series hasn’t moved forward massively with this title as the gameplay is still very solid.


The co-op mode and multiplayer go a long way to addressing these concerns admittedly, both proving replayable and enjoyable thanks to a decent range of levels in the multiplayer section and the solid tactical appeal of the Call of Duty design model in co-op. It’s this solidity which also makes the singleplayer very fun too, despite the period.

We’ve no doubt that World of War will sell very well and impress a lot of people. This is a game that’ll appeal to teenage fanboys a lot too – that’s what the quote-unquote adult material is there for, right? That’s why there’s a zombie Nazi mode too.

World of War isn’t going to hold our attention enough to get a second playthrough, despite how much we enjoyed playing with the co-op modes. The simple fact of the matter is that there are better games on the horizon this year, some of which also have zombies.

While World at War doesn’t fail in any specific way, it just fails to become the rousing success that its predecessor was. It’s definitely a playable game if you find you have the stomach for more World War II, but it doesn’t quite rise above that level of mediocrity.

Score Guide