The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Call of Duty: World at War is the best WWII mod for Call of Duty 4 available. I don’t regret my purchase? But I would suggest that most people just give it a rent and enjoy a quick play through of the single player unless they’re gung-ho about the multiplayer aspects.

That’s the short version. Here’s the long version: Call of Duty 4 has a fucking great engine, and as such, it’s no surprise at all that a game made with that engine to emulate that game plays awesome. It also has all those WWII weapons I fell in love with back in CoD2, so that’s nice. The Gewher is still my weapon of choice. Heh. The game also has co-op, which was the only thing CoD4 was missing. It’s kind of the saving grace of the game, though. The Single Player suffers from Me-too-ness. Most of the memorable sequences in CoD4 are recreated in this setting with a little twist. “Being Taught How To Snipe Level”? Check. “Manning a Gun Plane”? Check. Even the flipping back and forth between two stories is done, although here, it is for absolutely no reason whatsoever, instead of creating the narrative of CoD4. That’s really a problem: WWII is done to death. You would have to almost completely deviate from history to make a compelling narrative out of WWII at this point. CoD4 actually had a story, because it got to write a story, and it was much better for it. Still, Co-op makes everything better, and this is no exception at all. If you have a friend, you’ll have a good time.
But most of the single player is fun but forgettable, honestly. It doesn’t help that they went out of their way to do flame physics, and thus “flamethrower it” is the solution to almost everything in the game. It gets really annoying, because the flamethrower is not all that fun to use, after awhile. The first few times, it’s a lot of fun burning up grass to stop would-be ambushers. But then it makes you do it for like 4 more levels, and you realize how vulnerable you can be running forward with the flamethrower trying to hit people. It gets frustrating. What’s also frustrating is how, since there were no flamethrowers used all that much in the Russian campaign, they give you Molotov cocktails as your special grenades. It is extremely hard to kill someone with one of those, the animation to throw them takes about an hour, leaving you out in the open getting shot, and it takes up the place of smoke grenades, which are insanely useful against AI opponents. Many frustrating sections would have been a lot easier if I could have had just one smoke grenade instead of those stupid firebombs. Ugh.
Multiplayer, like the single player, is pretty well just re-purposed CoD4. However, that’s a great, great thing in my mind, as CoD4’s multiplayer was one of the first I really seriously got into in a shooter. It’s still just as fun, too. Many people are saying the dog summon, which replaces the helicopter summon, is more annoying. I completely disagree. If you’re paying attention, you can deal with the dogs. It’s hard to do more than hide in a building until the helicopter runs away, unless you’re carrying an RPG, and even then, you only have two tries and will probably miss both times. Then again, I suppose the helicopter can only be bothering one person at a time, so maybe it’s a tradeoff. In any case, though, the maps are completely great as well. They’re well-thought-out and I can’t think of any that annoy me. It’s a fun time. If you’re bored of CoD4’s multiplayer, this will easily scratch that itch. It’s enough new to get me back into multiplayer games, anyway.
The final piece of this puzzle is Nazi Zombies. I have no fucking idea why this is in the game. It starts up right after the credits, which kind of kills the sense of “war is a real thing” that they were trying very hard to foster by using real film clips and shit throughout the campaign. Still, it honestly looks like a lot of fun. You have to build up points to buy weapons, and you have to keep rebuilding these barricades as they get knocked down, and you can play with four players… it seems like a good time. At the same time, uh, I’m about to pick up Left 4 Dead, which is a much fuller experience, so it might be kind of moot.

Anyway, there’s some extended impressions. If you have it and are playing online on the 360, let me know, but again, probably don’t buy it unless you’re going to get your Team Deathmatch on. There are too many other great things coming out right now.

UPDATE FROM SEVERAL DAYS AFTER I WROTE THIS ORIGINALLY! The game randomly deleted my save, meaning I can’t pick any level but the first for co-op and can no longer play Nazi Zombies! Why is all of this locked? Why does the game hate me? Well, it worked, because I now hate this game. All developers making games with locked content, ESPECIALLY multiplayer content, should be shot and killed. I want to play what I paid for. Bastards.