Call of Duty: World at War

It's interesting to play World at War right after Far Cry 2, because they represent very different approaches to the same basic idea. The latter is all about providing you with an environment in which any number of things can happen based on what you do inside it, while the former is a series of planned events hand crafted to give every player the same experience. This is Treyarch's third stab at the Call of Duty franchise, and if the first two are like this, then they've proven themselves very capable of aping what Infinity Ward does with slightly diminished results. You can see how they took a lot of cues from the fourth game in terms of creating a more cinematic and dramatic feel, treating it a bit more like being in an epic war movie than being in a war. This works fine with a fictional, modern storyline, but doing it with a real historical event in which millions of people died seems a bit crass.

There's nothing wrong with showing a more brutal side of the war, because it's not like the real thing was completely clean and gentlemanly. It's just the tone of it that seems off, like it's trying to make the player think it's way cool instead of seriously considering the dark truth of the period in history. In any case, the attitude of the game doesn't negatively affect the design, which is pretty solid until near the end. The two campaigns that interweave despite being at different points in time focus on an American in the Pacific and a Russian on the Eastern Front, and there are some interesting missions here and there, such as a mimic of the flashback sniper missions in the last game with the Russians and a pretty intense and desperate naval battle with the Americans. It sort of falls apart near the end though, as the developers failed to realize that it's entirely possible to have a huge and dramatic final battle without it being stupidly, unfairly difficult and seemingly not even well debugged. As with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl last year, a frustrating final act really soured my opinion on a game that for the first 80% of its existence I was enjoying quite a bit more. It's really not that hard to keep that ending bit balanced, but it keeps happening like this.

This game is really what told me I need to upgrade my machine, as even on quite low settings it often chugged in more open areas and for some reason ran way too fast indoors to compensate. That's partly shoddy programming, as other developers released games around the same time that my computer can handle fine, but it's really time I improved what I'm playing with. Still, the game was pretty nice looking despite the issues, although I can't say the same about the sound. The series is known for its quality sound design, but a lot of the guns and explosions sounded weak to me for some reason, and while some of the orchestral music was quite nice, the inclusion of crunching metal guitars really wasn't. I liked the voice acting though, as throughout the game I was being commanded by Kiefer Sutherland and Gary Oldman, which automatically makes anything I'm told to do more awesome. The dramatic story moments didn't hit me nearly as hard as the last game's, but they were still pretty fun for the most part. There are some nice things to be found here, but in the end, World at War is a pretty flawed game.