Does this game want to be realistic or escapist? This should be a simple question to answer, yet its inconsistencies in design make it harder to crack than the Enigma machine. In one early setpiece, you grab an MG42 turret to hold off the Nazis.
These emplacements have limited ammo, and you have to reload them, suggesting that the game is aiming for a more immersive, believable style as opposed to the infinite ammo emplacements common in the genre. But then a few missions later you hop on a jeep turret and it has infinite ammo, only it can overheat. This is strange but for most of the game this rule of overheating vehicle turrets and ammo-based emplacements stays consistent, so it’s not that big an issue. However, in the penultimate level, you get on another MG42 to hold off more Nazis, except this one neither overheats nor has ammo. If you’re going to undercut mechanical choices just for a cool setpiece, why have these limitations at all?
There’s other little issues like this, such as every door open having a lengthy scripted animation, but then in the French Resistance level there’s no animation for opening windows. The weird “drag the stick to the circle and then press a button” quicktime event totally fails to simulate… any action, really. As silly as mashing buttons fast and stuff like that may seem, they offer a vague approximation of tension and more minute gestures than a typical control scheme can offer. The Call of Duty series has actually been pretty good with these kinds of things, the final fights in Modern Warfare 2 and 3 for instance have little intuitive motions as well as button prompts that immerse in the action of hand-to-hand combat decently well. Hell, even the trigger-mashing of Call of Duty 3 was more effective than this. I’m not against QTEs per se, but this game uses them really poorly.
For some reason, the cutscenes are locked at 30fps even though the game runs at 60, and the transitions often stutter even moreso, which is really jarring, especially considering how often this game is jumping into scripted sequences and wrestling control away from you. There’s a moment in the introduction to your squad where Zussman (I finished the game, like, an hour ago, and I had to Google his name because I had already forgotten it) does the five finger fillet and you can see the knife clipping through his hands, lmao. There’s so much care in some aspects of the presentation, but so many things just break or don’t work as intended and make the whole thing fall apart. There’s a few interesting ideas here, but most of it is taken from other, better ww2 fiction.
Call of Duty has always been a weird mishmash of various TV, movie, and other game influences, so the lack of originality isn’t a problem in and of itself, but WWII doesn’t do anything new with them, nor does it even do them as well as the things it’s cribbing from, let alone coming close to surpassing them. The narrative is totally divorced from the gameplay. In the cutscenes, your squadmates are your ride or dies, and you’re constantly saving each other’s asses from the brink of death, but in practice they… give you ammo sometimes, and mostly just sit back and watch while you risk your life doing all the difficult stuff.
They’re not teammates, they’re equipment dispensers. They don’t even give you the stuff you need, like Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite, you have to ask them for it, and they’ll just leave you to rot otherwise. This coldness of war worked in the old games precisely because they weren’t trying to connect you to the characters, aside from a few plot critical NPCs the man next to you could die at any moment in the grand, dehumanising machine of warfare. But here, contrasted with this inspiring tale of the heroism of 6 men played by actors whom Activision gave a bunch of money to pretend to be soldiers, it just makes it impossible to pick out any coherent thematic thread. The game takes great pains to show the destructive chaos of war, with nearby soldiers having limbs blown off constantly, but it’s also full of action setpieces like the collapsing church tower and the (rightfully) mocked train crash scene that would be more at home in an Uncharted game. There’s an entire mission about concentration camps, but you also have bullet time. This campaign doesn’t know if it wants to be a serious interactive experience or a heightened video game romp, and it fails at both.
These emplacements have limited ammo, and you have to reload them, suggesting that the game is aiming for a more immersive, believable style as opposed to the infinite ammo emplacements common in the genre. But then a few missions later you hop on a jeep turret and it has infinite ammo, only it can overheat. This is strange but for most of the game this rule of overheating vehicle turrets and ammo-based emplacements stays consistent, so it’s not that big an issue. However, in the penultimate level, you get on another MG42 to hold off more Nazis, except this one neither overheats nor has ammo. If you’re going to undercut mechanical choices just for a cool setpiece, why have these limitations at all?
There’s other little issues like this, such as every door open having a lengthy scripted animation, but then in the French Resistance level there’s no animation for opening windows. The weird “drag the stick to the circle and then press a button” quicktime event totally fails to simulate… any action, really. As silly as mashing buttons fast and stuff like that may seem, they offer a vague approximation of tension and more minute gestures than a typical control scheme can offer. The Call of Duty series has actually been pretty good with these kinds of things, the final fights in Modern Warfare 2 and 3 for instance have little intuitive motions as well as button prompts that immerse in the action of hand-to-hand combat decently well. Hell, even the trigger-mashing of Call of Duty 3 was more effective than this. I’m not against QTEs per se, but this game uses them really poorly.
For some reason, the cutscenes are locked at 30fps even though the game runs at 60, and the transitions often stutter even moreso, which is really jarring, especially considering how often this game is jumping into scripted sequences and wrestling control away from you. There’s a moment in the introduction to your squad where Zussman (I finished the game, like, an hour ago, and I had to Google his name because I had already forgotten it) does the five finger fillet and you can see the knife clipping through his hands, lmao. There’s so much care in some aspects of the presentation, but so many things just break or don’t work as intended and make the whole thing fall apart. There’s a few interesting ideas here, but most of it is taken from other, better ww2 fiction.
Call of Duty has always been a weird mishmash of various TV, movie, and other game influences, so the lack of originality isn’t a problem in and of itself, but WWII doesn’t do anything new with them, nor does it even do them as well as the things it’s cribbing from, let alone coming close to surpassing them. The narrative is totally divorced from the gameplay. In the cutscenes, your squadmates are your ride or dies, and you’re constantly saving each other’s asses from the brink of death, but in practice they… give you ammo sometimes, and mostly just sit back and watch while you risk your life doing all the difficult stuff.
They’re not teammates, they’re equipment dispensers. They don’t even give you the stuff you need, like Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite, you have to ask them for it, and they’ll just leave you to rot otherwise. This coldness of war worked in the old games precisely because they weren’t trying to connect you to the characters, aside from a few plot critical NPCs the man next to you could die at any moment in the grand, dehumanising machine of warfare. But here, contrasted with this inspiring tale of the heroism of 6 men played by actors whom Activision gave a bunch of money to pretend to be soldiers, it just makes it impossible to pick out any coherent thematic thread. The game takes great pains to show the destructive chaos of war, with nearby soldiers having limbs blown off constantly, but it’s also full of action setpieces like the collapsing church tower and the (rightfully) mocked train crash scene that would be more at home in an Uncharted game. There’s an entire mission about concentration camps, but you also have bullet time. This campaign doesn’t know if it wants to be a serious interactive experience or a heightened video game romp, and it fails at both.