Call of Duty 5 World At War

Call of Duty 5 (also known as Call of Duty: World at War) is the long-awaited and true successor to Call of Duty 3. It’s true that after the third game was released that many of us thought we might never see a World War II Call of Duty game again, and that a Call of Duty 5 review would never happen. Thankfully, after the sub-par effort of the third game by Treyarch, Infinity stepped in and brought out Modern Warfare, which obviously is not a WWII game, but a game set in a time not too far off the present day. This drastic turn took the series in a different direction, and instilled a lot of the freshness back into the series. If this hadn’t happened, I might very well not be writing this Call of Duty 5 review. After Modern Warfare, Treyarch once again picked up the reins from Infinity Ward and produced the excellent World at War, released late in 2008.

The game focuses on two main campaigns – one in the Eastern Pacific, where you play as an American marine fighting against the Japanese, and another Eastern Europe where you play as a Russian rifleman fighting the Germans, with the goal of taking Berlin. To start with, I can firmly say that this is the best looking shooter I have ever seen on the Playstation 3 or the XBOX 360. War never looked so good. The graphics are so smooth, and the character animations are spot on. The game has an amazing sense of realism, and stays away from the ‘cartoony’ side that so many shooters get drawn into. For example, soldiers cry out in pain, grenades send your enemies flying (sometimes in pieces), and Japanese soldiers scream “Kamikaze!”

World at War is a fairly linear shooter, which isn’t actually a bad thing. Although you’re always told where to go, and how to get there, you often have several different options as to how to approach an area, as well as different routes to take. As with the single player, the multiplayer game play is fun, frenetic and exciting at all times. With a large host of modes, you’re bound to keep coming back for ‘just one more game’. All in all, for this Call of Duty 5 review I would give the game an 8.5/10