CALL OF DUTY: WORLD AT WAR

Reviewer: Quercus Review Date: 24/07/2009 Score: 83% This is the second game in the Call of Duty franchise that Treyarch have developed, following on from the console-only (and fairly poor by all accounts) Call of Duty 3. This is also technically Call of Duty 5, although the numerals can get confusing. After the highly successful CoD4 stormed the world and with Infinity Ward working on its sequel (Modern Warfare 2 - or indeed CoD6), Treyarch were given the task of using the CoD4 engine to create a new version of the franchise, this time returning to the World War 2 setting of the original. This was something that many fans did not like the prospect of. Partly because it was WW2 again ("Oh no", they shouted, "not another game set in WW2!") and partly because Treyarch had messed up their earlier game. Personally I prefer a game set in WW2 than in the modern world. Both sides had very iconic and very evenly balanced technology (well, more or less). The conflict was morally unambiguous (unlike most modern conflicts) and uncluded a huge number of nations all over the globe. Certainly in the FPS genre, the amount of modern-era games vastly eclipses any historical games, including WW2 ones. However, I did enjoy CoD4 and loved what they had done both with the engine and the multiplayer side of things, so I remained optimistic that Treyarch couldn't take a highly polished engine and ranking system and mess it up. Could they? Well, sort of. In general the game is very good. For some reason the engine was tweaked a bit meaning that people who could play CoD4 with no trouble suddenly found their graphics cards struggling with CoD:WaW. The multiplayer ranking system is pretty much lifted from CoD4 and tweaked a bit, making it a very good gaming experience. The flamethrower effects are incredible to look at and in general the maps themselves are prettier than CoD4. To use the multiplayer ranking system, a certain amount of liberty has been taken with weapons. Aperture sights (similar to modern red-dot sights) have been added to some of the weapons and the perks are retty much exactly the same, including the very annoying last stand and martyrdom - although in the case of last stand (now called Second Chance) they have at least added the ability of anyone with this perk to revive someone struck down, which adds a nice bit of teamwork within the game. Kill streaks have a recon plane replacing the modern day UAV, artillery strikes replacing bomber runs and a pack of dogs replacing the attack helicopter. Of these, the dogs can be frustrating if their numbers and health haven't been modified in the setup to match the other server settings, but the most frustrating is actually the UAV. Using the Stopping Power perk (which increases bullet damage) feels more needed in CoD:WaW than in CoD4 and as this shares a perk slot with Camouflage (which hides you from the recon plane), that perk is almost never used. New to a PC version of Call of Duty, is the ability to play some of the single player missions in co-op with up to three other people. This is very welcome and highly ejoyable. Treyarch also introduced some "Nazi Zombie" maps, presumably as a bit of a laugh. These have you fighting against waves of zombies to earn money that you can use to upgrade your weapons or open map areas and is also very good fun. Playing through the campaign in single player (which has sets of missions either in the Pacific or Eastern Germany) is not nearly as fun as either the exceptionally well-written and gripping CoD4 campaign. Nor is it as fun as playing the missions in co-op (see above), but they are fairly good. It suffers from the usual CoD mechanic of having the enemy endlessly respawn in an area until you reach a certain point, which hopefully they will address in the next game (CoD6 that shall not be called CoD6). The game does have its flaws. More to do with bugs in the code rather than the design itself. On release there were bugged maps, the respawn code was appalling (the worst in any CoD game - where you can spawn and instantly have an enemy spawn behind you) and stupidly treyarch did not lock down the experience per kill settings, so for the first few months of release, many servers appeared where you could earn ridiculours amounts of experience for each kill (up to 1,000 times the normal amount) and thus "power rank" your way up through the levels and prestige levels, which made a mockery of the whole multiplayer ranking. This has caused a large number of players to drift back to CoD4 or even CoD:UO (which still has a dedicated following), but many of these concerns have now been addressed and the addition of two extra map packs have made the game very enjoyable, even if quite expensive on the console versions where the map packs have to be purchased. It also has to be said that the quality of the maps in the two map packs is very high and both have also added extra Nazi Zombie maps.