Fighting Hitler. Again. (Call of Duty: World at War (Xbox 360))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Call of Duty: World at War (Xbox 360)
Date:	25/06/09 (116 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Multiplayer is good, the story mode is quite fun

Disadvantages: Most missions are the same, it's nowhere near as inventive as its predecessor

This is an Xbox 360 game released last year. It sells on amazon at time of writing for £28.

So, Call of Duty, the venerable first person shooter game series, has returned to the Second World War. Call of Duty 4, 'Modern Warfare', had been set in the present day and allowed you to play out all your dirty neocon fantasies by murdering Arabs. I think the decision to go back to good old WWII was met with a disappointment by a lot of fans. Not me, though - I've loved a good World War shoot 'em up ever since Wolfenstein let you go head-to-head with Hitler and his robotic exoskeleton...

Unfortunately it doesn't live up to expectations, or at least the single-player story mode doesn't. CoD 4 was (is) a brilliant single-player game with a good variety of missions and astonishing graphics and gameplay. I won't say 'it's like being in a real war', because that would be vacuous, but it is a lot like being in a two-dimensional war with incidental music and no risk to your person. But somehow, even though it uses the same game engine as CoD 4, Worlds at War just doesn't quite cut the mustard (it was made by a different company).

For a start the graphics, while good, don't seem as impressive as those in the earlier game. There are some amazing things in there - the way the focus changes when you zoom in on something is still lovely - but it seems a bit... I don't know... cartoony is probably the wrong word, but not as realistic, anyway. The locations all look fine, the people move fairly realistically, but it never really feels like you're looking at anything real.

While the levels are agreeably linear (I hate shooting games where you have to run around solving puzzles before it rewards you with things to kill), there are elements in some missions that are badly designed. Some of the checkpoints, especially, are misconceived, often forcing you to listen to the same bits of dull dialogue over and over again as you keep having to replay difficult bits.

There are two unrelated strands to the story - in one strand you play as a US marine fighting the Japanese on various Pacific islands, in the other you're a Russian infantry man fighting your way from Stalingrad to Berlin. As with other Call of Duty games, you're part of a platoon of computer-controlled soldiers. This is frustrating when they get in your way, as they invariably do when you're trying to do something particularly tricky. They rarely offer much in the way of help, but I guess it's more realistic than older games that had you winning the war single-handedly.

For some reason the two main characters (apart from you) are voiced by celebrities. Your sergeant in the US section is played by Kiefer Sutherland. The Russian equivalent is voiced by Gary Oldman. This really is a weird decision, as they must both have cost a lot to hire, but frankly, any half-decent voice actor could have done the parts as well. And bafflingly, having hired two actors you've heard of, they've then kept quiet about it. They're not mentioned anywhere on the game's packaging. Surely they'd want to shout it from the rooftops: "Look! We've hired some B-Movie actors! Buy our game!"

The main problem with story mode is that the missions are very, very samey. You have jungle missions and ruined city missions. And that's about it. There are two attempts to break things up - one mission where you drive a tank, and one where you're a tailgunner in a seaplane - but neither is terribly interesting. Skipping between two unrelated stories is distracting, and of course they're both quite predictable (I'd imagine most people playing the game know how the war ended). There are certainly no twists like the amazing nuclear bomb in CoD 4, and no sense of the stakes rising as the game progresses (in fact by the end, as the Red Army storms Berlin, you're not in any sense playing as the underdogs, as is traditional in games of this type).

Still, it's not all bad. You get to skulk around shooting people. Or setting them on fire, blowing them up, or sticking a knife through their throat. Sniping is fun; people's limbs fly off when they get blown up; and there's a wide variety of weapons. The music is pretty good, if very typical ('world music' for the Japanese bits, more martial stuff for the Russians). The game does get difficult in the later missions, especially playing on 'veteran', the toughest level, but only occasionally to the extent that I threw my controller across the room.

The game's got a 15 certificate, probably as much for the language as anything. The American characters swear a lot. I find this rather tiresome, a cheap way of showing how 'mature' we all are, but I suspect soldiers probably do swear a lot when they're under fire (oddly, the Russians don't swear at all. They just talk about the Motherland. What is it about foreign accents that makes script-writers lose all sense of what sounds real?).

I'm not entirely happy about playing as the Soviets, who were pretty unpleasant (and your character is meant to cheerfully help murder prisoners of war). But I guess it's good that they've steered clear of the Private Ryan/Band of Brothers settings that most war games are full of. The whole game is in slightly poor taste anyway, given that the Second World War was real. I can't help but think that all those people who died might be a bit miffed at the thought of people like me playing video games about it.

Where this game does work as well as its predecessor is in the online multi-player. There are many, many game types on Xbox Live; I usually stick with team deathmatch as it attracts the most players (many of them American children who swear like dockers and are much, much better than me. Ah well). Most of the multiplayer maps - made up of segments of the story mode maps - are nicely done. New maps have recently been made available for download (not for free, sadly), and more are apparently on the way. The thing I like best is that when you kill seven people in a row, without dying yourself, you get to summon a pack of dogs to come and eat your foes. This is marvellous, as it allows me to say 'release the hounds' in a Mr-Burns-off-The-Simpsons voice. I have yet to grow tired of this.

But the multi-player, hounds notwithstanding, is no better than the multiplayer in CoD 4, and if you're only going to buy one, make it that one. Worlds at War isn't a complete disgrace, but the fact that it's already cheaper than its predecessor speaks volumes. It's a fun first person shooter, but it lacks variety, and there are much better available.

Summary: A slightly underwhelming first person shooter