Call of Duty: WWII Review

Multiplayer:

Some people accuse Call of Duty of no longer being an innovator, of playing it safe. But that’s sort of natural when you have a massive casual audience. And at least this year Sledgehammer have made an effort to increase the opportunities for social interaction, even if they are currently completely broken. This year introduces the ‘HQ’, which is the equivalent of The Tower in Destiny – a place where players can hang out, form parties, buy things and interact in down-time between games. Unfortunately server issues mean that it’s a lonely space at the moment, but Activision certainly have the resources to fix this. It’s also the place where you can open your loot boxes, the less salubrious feature which has made its way into the game this year. It’s a pretty standard implementation, with the exception that theoretically others can see what you’re opening and react when HQ is working.

The HQ is a neat concept, but it does have some slightly unwelcome consequences. You load back into it after every match, which makes it feel like there’s longer between each game; matchmaking just feels like a somewhat slower exercise regardless when compared to previous games in the series. In game, performance is thankfully as good as you would expect, although personally I felt like the maps aren’t always at the same quality as past games. For me, ‘War’ quickly became my preferred way to play, which has some interesting objectives and time-based gameplay added to the classic CoD gameplay. It’s like a ‘lite’ version of Battlefield, but faster-paced and with quicker matches.

Presentation:

We’ve waited a little bit of time to finally publish this review – partly to see if HQ would get fixed, but mostly so I could play through the game on Xbox One X. On Microsoft’s new console (albeit we are still running on a 1080p display for the moment), you do get improved performance over the base console. Levels load faster, the game hits 60 FPS more consistently, and the game is locked to 1080p throughout, rather than using some dynamic resolution scaling, so the game looks crisper. However, these are relatively minor upgrades – on our display you wouldn’t notice any meaningful upgrade when the game is in motion.

Sound is crisp and bassy, with excellent directional audio. Having said that, it’s disappointing that Sledgehammer have chosen not to include Atmos for the audio options, which I feel would have really enhanced the audio-visual experience for such an explosive title.

Conclusion:

Personally, I didn’t feel the need for Call of Duty to necessarily return to a historical conflict. Having said that, Sledgehammer mostly pull things off. You generally have automatic weapons in multiplayer, and although the maps aren’t the best ever, and the matchmaking is slow whilst server issues are sorted out, the series has moved back in the direction in which fans were calling for. The campaign has a generic storyline, but enough action and explosive moments to make it feel expensive and memorable enough. Sledgehammer had an opportunity to really nail things, and whilst this will feel like a step in the right direction for most, it’s not the tour-de-force that people were clearly hoping for.