The knife animations are excellent as well, such that stabbing an enemy in the chest or the back and hearing that slicing crunch is still the most satisfying way to kill.įollowing Call of Duty 4’s lead, there’s a lot of variety in the mission types. All of the guns have their own individual strengths and weaknesses, and firing them feels as satisfying as ever. All of the controls are in the same place as Call of Duty 4 and the crosshair still glides across the screen and kind of floats onto your target if you come close to aiming at an enemy. The core gameplay is what we’ve come to expect from Call of Duty games. Nonetheless the game looks good, but these are niggles that could do with being fixed, and probably should have been fixed by now given that the key foundations had already been laid down by Call of Duty 4. And after my experience in the Killzone 2 beta, the lack of physics can make the reaction of enemies to your bullets a little underwhelming. Plants and bushes in particular look like cardboard cut-outs. However, at times the game can look like a copy and paste job. For example, if you’re inching your gun around a piece of cover, waiting for that ardent Japanese machine-gunner to come into your sites, being shoved completely out into the open by an AI teammate taking your piece of cover is bloody annoying. In veteran mode this is literally deadly and extremely frustrating. But at the same time little has been done to combat some of the more annoying features of the series – your allies will stand and block your path, you can’t move them by nudging them and you can’t just walk through them, you have to move around them. The game runs well, without any of the annoying graphical glitches that plagued Call of Duty 3 (no more getting stuck on a piece of rock or a tree and having to restart the game, for example). The Call of Duty 4 framework is still very much in place, and little seems to have been done to update the model, but that still enables it to be a very good looking game. It’s much darker, grittier and horrific than the American campaign. I found the Russian story to be the more compelling and varied of the two, the very first mission begins with a great scene that really sets the tone of murderous revenge that permeates the Russian campaign. The second campaign is played out in the Pacific, from the perspective of an American Marine at a point where the Japanese are being so overwhelmed in numbers that they’ve begun their kamikaze suicide runs. Firstly that of a Russian soldier as the Red Army avenges the siege of Stalingrad and pushes the Wehrmacht back into Germany, and from there on to street skirmishes in Berlin and eventual victory. We’re back in World War II this time around, following the military campaign from two perspectives. Call of Duty: World at War is a really good game, and whilst history will invariably view it as being in Call of Duty 4’s shadow, Treyarch have done themselves proud here and produced one of the better games in the series. So it’s a relief to be proven wrong, at least partially. Compare their track history with Infinity Ward’s, the company responsible for the more critically praised Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 4, and you might understand my initial scepticism. I’ve owned and enjoyed most of the games in the series, including Call of Duty 3, which I consider it to be by far the weakest. As a fan of the series I was highly sceptical of Call of Duty: World at War. By Craig S, posted on 07 January 2009 / 11,634 Views
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