I personally don’t have a lot of experience with the Call of Duty franchise. I rarely bought First Person Shooters when I was younger, but the ones I had were really fun. I have also been hearing a split between a lot of my friends on their opinion on the newest installment, Call of Duty: WWII. After a while, I wanted to find out what was causing the split, so I borrowed a copy from a friend (Thanks, Drew) and played for about a week to get a good feel for it. While I still don’t think that a week was enough time to sink my teeth into it, I thought it had some really fun things and some not so fun things.
The biggest draw for me when it comes to shooters is the campaign. I know I’m the only person who thinks that way, but it’s easier for me to feel bad about making mistakes instead of my friends just calling me “trash”. I have played a few CoD games set in World War II, some good, some bad. From what I could tell, this game was very similar to those. I hate driving without being able to see my entire surroundings. I also hate driving with the left and right sticks. Something about it seems wrong to my hands. That being said, I liked some of these events. There was one where I shot down planes and sniped enemies from a church tower. Those I found to be really fun, but still sometimes annoying. Other than that, WWII seems to be a reskin of past Call of Duty games. Everything from the weapons to the maps felt eerily similar to other games set in WWII.
Zombies returns for the billionth time in WWII. I thought that it seemed like a standard mode, and nothing really stood out to me other than constantly turning on the power, which got annoying fast. I think this is a fine mode with friends, but kinda lame to play alone. Zombies just didn’t have any cool mechanics that caught my eye. This is a short paragraph, but there’s not a lot to say about the mode.
And then there is the multiplayer mode. For those of you who don’t know, loot boxes are in-game items you pay for to receive a random award. There’s been a big controversy on this topic recently, but that’s another article entirely. The lobby is basically just where you play your games and open loot crates. This can get annoying because of how often the game encourages you to buy them. That’s just the lobby though, while the gameplay is about as stale as ever. I am not very good at shooters, but CoD, in general,l is very hard to pick up without getting frustrated because everyone has better gear than you, especially in WWII. This is either because they payed for tons of loot boxes, or have been playing non stop. That’s why I had a hard time getting positive things to say about the multiplayer, because every time I had one cool moment, there were ten moment of getting sniped in the back.
While it sounds like I didn’t really like this game, I really did have a lot of fun. I adored the opening cinematic that played in black in white. When I saw that, it got my blood pumping. It was awesome. This game also looks beautiful on Xbox One. I couldn’t stop thinking about how pretty the game looked and sounded.
That being said, I think that some of the flaws outweigh a few of the great things. Activision, the makers of Call of Duty, tried to take two steps forward with their franchise, but then made one step back with pandering to CoD fans and loot crates.
Score: 8/10
If you like to play alone or with friends, you’ll have a fun time, but it can be bogged down by annoying mechanics.
Reviewed on Xbox One
