The Call of Duty franchise is seen as a lion in the first person shooter genre with its immense popularity; however, in the last few years, the games in this franchise have been less than stellar. Sadly this newest game, released in early November 2017,  just manages to stave off the death of the franchise. I gave it a few months to improve with updates, and not much has changed for the better.

Call of Duty World War 2 is not in any way a bad game; however, it doesn’t do anything particularly amazing either. It is just a very average game.

The campaign is one of the better campaigns they have created but still consists of the same insane ridiculous moments and even some moments straight from Saving Private Ryan. The starting level of D-Day does give a good first impression; however, the longer the game goes on, the flaws start to show. In the game, players are clearly meant to care for the character’s friends, but the game never delivers on the attachment to your team.

difficulties of this game are a mixed bag. For example, on regular difficulty the enemies will miss the majority of their shots, and when they do hit, they do minimal damage. However, on hardened difficulty, one up from regular difficulty, the enemies will have pixel perfect accuracy and will hit you through impossible angles. Veteran is a good mix of challenge without the cheap pixel perfect accuracy. The difficulties are inconsistent. In all the extreme linear gameplay and forgettable characters, the story isn’t very impressive except for the few epic moments that might bring a smile to your face.

In Zombies mode, the player slaughtering the endless waves of Hitler’s reanimated soldiers. This popular mode sadly is quite empty with only two maps one being a small house to survive in. The second map has a selection of small objectives with the goal to trigger an event that would activate a boss round, and, obviously you have to survive the rounds it takes to trigger the event. The first house map is more like the classic zombies in Call of Duty World at War when you had only a small two-story building to survive in. The second, more objective-based zombies map, is huge, filled plenty of doors to sections of the map to survive and gain better weaponry. It is no doubt great fun for a bit, but the lack of maps is a bit underwhelming.

They try to spice the game-play up by letting you customize your class at rank 5, which is easy enough to get there. Each class gets one ultimate ability so save yourself in last stand scenarios such as being invisible to zombies, pushing back zombies in a radius of 5 meters, infinite ammo for a short time, and, finally, simple but effective, medic ability to get your team back in the fight. In total, the zombies mode is sure an extra to have for the game as it does provide quite a bit of fun from the regular running and gunning.

Finally, the reason why this game is such a monster franchise is its multiplayer mode. Sadly, there’s nothing really new and interesting there. The game plays like every other Call of Duty and your obvious choices for guns are the BAR and the FG-42, as they are easily the best rifles in the game. However that doesn’t mean you can’t excel using the other weapons in the game those particular weapons just make average players seem so much better because of these weapons’ time to kill. You have your typical modes in a Call of Duty game; however, if you’re unlucky and play alone, you might just have a team that goes for kills, and you’ll be left playing objectively. It seems also a lot of the variety in game modes is much more lacking and relying on weekly events and contracts that serve as goals to get experience and supply drops faster to have variety. The contracts sound like a good idea but don’t feel like they have any real impact and meaning when completing these challenges.

This weekly event way of having variety in games modes leaves many people missing some of their favorites. Also, there is the obvious cash grab that is supply drops to try and get you to pay money for a slightly different gun and boost to experience and is a sad excuse for a sense on progression. These micro-transactions in video games though in this may seem more cosmetic for the time being trains you to accept this concept more and more till its pay to win.

The most fun you’ll have is squading up with a few friends in the new war mode but plenty of other games do this better. In this mode the player and other players will have to either attack or defend multiple objectives. The attacking sides tries to keep moving forward to each objective by completing a objective such as guiding tanks to the front-lines to get to the next objective till the all objectives are complete or time is expired. The defending side tries to keep the attacking side from completing their objective by eliminating the enemy and making choke points that is hard to reach the objective.

In conclusion Call of Duty World War 2 earns only a 6 out of 10. It is really a mediocre game at best.It feels rinsed and repeated one two many time this time around. Everything in the game just gets stale in the first few months. My recommendation is wait for a bit of a price reduction before picking this game up.