Call of Duty:World at War, Multiplayer

I’ve now spent a few hours playing World at War multiplayer. I must admit it’s a good deal of fun, but if you’ve played CoD4, it really adds nothing new to the experience. Aside from the Nazi Zombie mode, which is pretty cool, but fleeting.

World at War immediately reminded me of everything I loved about CoD4’s multiplayer, but at the same time rekindled my hatred of WWII weapons. Using an iron sight is quite hard at long range, and while they do have a red dot scope equivalent, you must sacrifice certain very useful perks in order to use it. I found this very difficult to get used to since the standard sight on just about every gun in CoD4 was a red dot scope. The iron sight is especially cumbersome because I found people much harder to see on certain maps. The game has a much more brownish hue than the already overly brown world of current gen shooters. This coupled with the American uniforms made people blend in far more than I think Treyarch intended.

All in all, I must say Treyarch did a pretty bang up job of capturing what Infinity Ward laid out in 2007. I never played CoD3, but I heard the biggest complaint for it was the multiplayer. Treyarch responded quite well to this problem, but I still can’t help but wonder if they really did anything. Infinity Ward clearly just gave them the code from CoD4. The game literally feels like a reskinning of CoD4. Sure, Treyarch had to design their own maps, balance the different weapons, and a few other things, which they did quite well. But so much of the game looks and feels exactly like CoD4, right down to the menu screen and player interface.

The Nazi Zombie mode is both hilarious and fun. Every time I think about it, I wonder if anyone in 1939 had any idea that 70 years later we would have made a game out of surviving an endless horde of zombified versions of Nazis. It’s absolutely ridiculous considering this is all loosely based on something that happened not all that long ago. I digress, the mode is a good time and requires some serious teamwork if you plan on getting past round ten. It is a lot like Gears of War 2’s Horde mode and suffers from the same problem I had with that. Once I beat all 50 rounds of Horde mode I found replaying it incredibly boring. Even on the higher difficulty settings I didn’t really want to play it anymore. Nazi Zombie mode is the same way only as far as I can tell there is no end. After playing through three or four times I felt like I experienced all it had to offer and wanted to return to deathmatch.

If you’re still addicted to CoD4, but want a change of scenery, World at War should be sufficient to hold you until Modern Warfare 2. Though, seeing as I’m six months late to the party, everyone probably already knows that. I think World at War is still just under Halo 3 for top games played on Live, followed closely still by CoD4. Clearly people are playing it. Honestly though, the biggest thing World at War did for me was that it got me hyped for Modern Warfare 2. I can’t wait to see what the creators of the franchise have been doing these last two years.