“Call of Duty: WWII,” the latest installment of the classic game franchise, is not worth the chunk of change that gamers are forced to pay in order to play.

“CoD WWII” released in early November and does have some strengths. I reserve many criticisms about the Call of Duty franchise. Many gamers hold a stigma against them for being the lowest of video games. Call of Duty is not up to par with many other franchises that are doing similar things. 

“CoD WWII” is a worthwhile game to buy, but not at the full pricing of $60. The game is fun but it simply does not offer $60 worth of content, nor does it offer enough improvement from previous Call of Duty titles. 

This being said, “CoD WWII” is a vast improvement on the franchise. CoD games always have and always will sell well, so that isn’t really an accurate gauge of improvement. The biggest success of this game is the breaking of the mold of the recent CoD games.

“CoD: WWII” has done this in a few different ways. The biggest one is that they finally went back to the basics. The CoD franchise started in the World Wars era and it seemed to slowly creep forward in time until they were stuck in this rut of futuristic gameplay, moved along by robots and jetpacks.

Now, Sledgehammer Games, the newest developer team on the CoD franchise, has broken away from that and gone back to what made CoD famous. 

To elaborate, in the beginning, CoD was made by Infinity Ward and published by Activision, a gaming industry giant. After the success of the first CoD, Activision immediately bought Infinity Ward and CoD along with it.

Then in CoD 3, they brought in a new company, Treyarch, who would then alternate games with Infinity Ward. Recently, the parent company, Activision, created Sledgehammer to alternate with other developers every three years.

This is only Sledgehammer’s second CoD game, both of which have had a zombies like gamemode like that of Treyarch’s CoD games. So far I’ve played the campaign, the Nazi zombies and the multiplayer, and they are all pretty fun.

The Nazi zombies was what I was most excited for and I have to say that they really made it their own. The co-founder of Sledgehammer also worked on the Dead Space series. While playing the Nazi zombie game mode, it is very apparent the inspirations from “Dead Space,” from the atmosphere to the high amount. 

These changes are extremely refreshing and fun, but it tires so much easier than that of previous zombies. The developers could have negated this by including two full maps instead of a full map and a house. Also, something about the full map makes it feel more repetitive, which can mostly be accounted for in the objective base to the game mode, which makes it feel like the player is doing the same objectives over and over.

The campaign is interesting and a pretty standard CoD campaign, but it does do a good job of creating an atmosphere of actual war, and fairly accurately depicts the storming of the beaches at D-Day.

The multiplayer is very fun but it doesn’t really break away from the typical CoD multiplayer. I will say that there are a lot of refreshing aspects like the fact that there are daily missions and a few new game modes.

The biggest new game mode is a recreation of an old one called War. It is actually really fun because it is completely objective based and has two sides, attackers and defenders. The attacking team is trying to complete objectives and the defending team is trying to stop them. This kind of gameplay ups the immersion factor and makes the players feel like they are actually storming the beaches and pushing the front.

Now, Sledgehammer really stuck to to mold in a lot of ways, with a lot of things that the CoD franchise needs to get away from. The CoD games have extremely small multiplayer maps, and areas to play and the variety of terrain is nonexistent.

The player dies if they fall in the water or go to far outside the map. There is no climbing on and over things or blowing new pathways through walls to make new ways of going. They need to make the maps feel more open and free. These are reasons that the Battlefield franchise has found so much success.

“CoD: WWII” also doesn’t have the best graphics. For a cutting-edge gaming company, the engine and the graphics aren’t that cutting edge. Not to mention that the servers didn’t work for the first few days.

One thing the developers did get right is they added division on to the traditional class system that allows the player to have different added bonuses onto their soldier. They also made shotguns relevant again with the incendiary shells that comes with the shotgun-oriented division.

Given these things, I wouldn’t put this game on the top of the must-buy list. Overall, I would give it a six out of 10. It is good for casual gamers and gamers that just enjoy the genre. It is easy to sit around and play it for 15 minutesor for a few hours, but it could most definitely use some work. Hopefully,  in the next CoD titles we will see even more mold-breaking features to games.

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