After a look at the single player portion of Call of Duty: World at War at the Eurogamer Expo and a lot of time on the multiplayer beta, I thought I’d write up a brief preview of the game. While being dismissed in many places as “another WW2 shooter”, I feel that the game deserves a bit more than that.

As a rule, World War 2 shooters have never been something I enjoy; slow and clunky weapons, drab visuals, and an overly sober tone are characteristics that they tend to share. However, I am enjoying World at War at the moment, for a number of reasons. Hit the jump to hear them.

The first I played of Call of Duty: World at War was a portion of the singleplayer mode. I’m not sure how far into the game it was, but the level was set in a jungle, and I was fighting troops geared up in camouflage and with bigger guns than me. Straight away, I started noticing similarities to Call of Duty 4- examples include the grenade indicator, the aiming mechanic, and the reticule notification of a hit. Perhaps it was because of the weapons (slow and clunky- it is a WW2 shooter, after all), but it was pretty difficult.

There were a lot of explosions, smoke, and plants around, which made it hard to spot where the enemies were coming from. Patrick and I also encountered an irritating spawn glitch- the game had autosaved right before an enemy knife-killed us, meaning that every time we died, the enemy would insta-kill us right as we spawned.

While the single player portion of the game that I played was sub-par and very similar to any other WW2 shooter, the multi-player beta that I have been playing is certainly worth a look. If you could only know one thing about it, it would be this: It’s Call of Duty 4 in WW2. Many of the same perks and challenges have been ripped straight from Call of Duty 4, the engine is identical, and it generally feels like the same game.

It might sound like a criticism, but Call of Duty 4 is a fantastic game, and all of it’s juicy goodness has been gathered up and put into Call of Duty: World at War. The guns may be a little dated, but since everyone has to deal with that, the proverbial playing field has been metaphorically leveled. It’s still fun leveling up and getting better weapons and attachments, and doing so isn’t so difficult as to frustrate.

The maps in the beta are a little small, but some, especially Castle (a Japanese stronghold), are beautiful to behold, and provide a variety of tactics. Hopefully the full game will provide a better selection of maps, as I’ve only played three so far. There is a good selection of weaponry in terms of function, but it seems like some, like the shotguns, need a lot of practice before they become useful- the maps tend to facilitate long rage weapons over short range ones.

I’m actually looking forward to this game now, after a skeptical start (when I heard the setting was back to WW2, and who the developer was). As long as the single-player has some better locations, and the story isn’t too awful, I’m confident that will be decent. Call of Duty: World at War is shaping up to be a great game: it does very little new, but why change something that has shown to be a lot of fun?

Tags: Call of Duty: World At War, Eurogamer Expo, Preview, Surprisingly good

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• Call of Duty: World at War DLC Coming March 19
• Call of Duty: World at War Third-Fastest Selling Videogame In The UK
• Call of Duty: World at War gets Collector’s Edition
• World at War map packs sell over 4 million

2 Comments » Gunny Highway on November 2, 2008 1:42 pm I am so looking forward to this. I hope that it will it will not be a letdown like COD3 was (for me anyway). I will be in line for this one. Plus they are going to have it for PC, which is a good move. Sam Naylor on November 2, 2008 1:48 pm Yeah, I’ve been playing the PC beta. It’s good. RSS feed for comments on this post. Comment Now Note: Commenting on Ripten does not currently require registration, however to be eligible for contests on the site, you must be a registered user. Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Commenting Rules: No hate speech allowed. If you must argue, please debate intelligently. Comments containing selected keywords or outbound links will be put into moderation to help prevent spam. Ripten reserves the right to delete comments and ban anyone who doesn't follow the rules. Thanks. Notify me of followup comments Tired of the Goomba? Upload your own custom comment avatar.