Shop Ireland

Call of Duty: World at War (PC)

Click to tell a friend about this item...

More Product Details...

Review Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next »

Click here to add a review!

Average rating -

Rating: - Flawed, but enjoyable:

After Call of Duty 4 I'm not sure why Treyarch felt the need to bounce back to WW2. Comfortable ground I suppose. The game promises to be a complete re-imagining of the FPS War Shooter genre, but pretty much ends up being another rail shooter.

Some maps offer variety, sprawling asian islands and villages....but you quickly find you can't go more than 3 yards to either side without being boxed in by a few waist high rocks, or mysteriously linear cityscapes with conveniently collapsing walls.

Your allies are all useless, and you always end up as Numero Uno on the enemy hit list (not helped by the fact you're Mr.Gopher for the entire game - a ploy that ran out of steam in the Medal of Honor games). On the higher difficulty settings meanwhile you'll find yourself repeating the same 20 seconds of your life as effectively you fall victim to respawning enemies, and the fact that you have to dive out of cover in order to "progress" to the next event trigger.

The game can be exceedingly frustrating and you can feel as if you're playing through endless setpieces where your contribution is only required in order to trigger an event - rather than actually contributing to the completion of an event.

The game, without the existence of COD4 would be another passable COD/MOH clone. With COD4 however it really shows that this genre (in this imagining) is really on its last legs. When you compare the helicopter rescue and subsequent atomic blast of COD4, or the beach landing of MOH, to anything in this one you quickly realise that there is absolutely no substance.

On other notes:
It's beautiful, sound is great, voice acting brilliant, script and plots are enjoyable, maps are generally well made with varying ways of approaching in many cases (not all will work).

It has bugs (videos clip, sound breaks, game gives you a black screen with nothing else) though patches may have helped this since.

The fundamentals are sound, and the engine has plenty to give still - so hopefully Treyarch will give their next effort some more thought.

Rating: - Decnet Game

World At War holds it's ground against Modern Warfare & it had a lot to stand up to, so again well worth the cash i payed for it

Rating: - Enjoyable game, but with some annoyances

Having played all of the Call of Duty games and being particulary impressed with the fourth installment, how would this stack up?

In Call of Duty world at war you play two campaigns, one being the Russian army pushing into Germany and the other the Americans fighting the Japanese. The game keeps to the classic call of Duty style, shooting loads of Enemy AI and completing objectives. There's also a tank mission and a mission where you are an aircraft gunner shooting the Japanese Navy. Like other Call of Duty games this is a linear arcade game rather than a war simulation game.

While Call of Duty WAW is enjoyable to play, unfortunately there are some annoyances that stop me giving this five stars. Firstly, there have been occasions where I've seen an enemy AI soldier, like a Japanese soldier lying on the ground before they do their charge or an enemy in a tree, but when I shoot them nothing happens. The game wont let me interact and shoot them until I've passed over this invisible virtual trigger line. Secondly, the Allied AI troops seem to like charging to their deaths without actually achieving anything. In Call of Duty 4 I felt the friendly AI actually worked with you, but with this they are useless. Thirdly, friendly AI soldiers like to run out in front of your fire. Fourthly, The Enemy Soldiers keep re-spawning in some of the parts of the game until you pass over that invisible trigger line.

On the graphics side they've done a good Job here and the effects are very good. I wouldn't say the graphics are a huge step up from call of duty 4, but they're still excellent. I'm using an Nvidia 9800GT card, which managed to allow me to play the game with max settings and Framerates smooth throughout.

So in conclusion Call of Duty world at war is an enjoyable game and worth a play, but it could of been better.

Rating: - CODWaW we will play forever

This is the best game ever available,you can play on and on with your friends and will never get bored.Online its just fantastic , one little moan no reference to update Punkbuster,make sure you to as soon as you installed game and collect all the updates,currently on 1.4

Rating: - Not terrible by any stretch, Just oddly lacking

I have no problem with the setting, the visuals are amazing, even the length of the single player is adequate, the multiplayer is OK even though the perks system still mean your initial forays as a new buyer Today will involve getting your butt kicked by all the old hands with better weapons and upgrades. This is not an iredeemably bad game, it's just from a lineage that previously on PC has been pretty much top of the wartime shooter tree, it has a lot to live up to and it doesn't quite do it.

The problems are in the AI on both sides in single player, sometimes you will find yourself literally stood next to an enemy and they will not react, not a flicker as you start mowing them down with a machine gun, also your squad mates seem to delight in walking into your line of fire, and when they do do it, it is almost impossible to tell them apart from enemies from any sort of distance.

More often than not you will find the only way to actually beat levels is to just run like hell past the respawning points and hope your health holds out as you mop up, I appreciate they're using the constant respawning to create a challenge, but it feels especially lazy here for some reason, like they couldn't be bothered with level design and just decided to throw more enemies at you instead. The checkpoint save system is all well and good if the checkpoints are sensibly spaced, but there are a couple that will have you tearing your hair out as you play the same five minutes over and over again before copping a stray grenade just before the next checkpoint.

Grenades are another pain, they are rightly deadly, but a lot of the time you get killed trying to pick the grenade up to throw it back, or you think your about to pick it up, move a little too far and succeed only in throwing another grenade at your own feet, there are some sequences where as far as I can tell your choices are die, die or die, you'll dodge the bloke with the bayonet, kill the guy behind him with the machine gun and then get blown up by the grenade that landed in the middle of the sequence ("you were blown up by a grenade, watch the grenade danger indicator" for the kajillionth time), again I appreciate war can be hell, but this is a game, I expect to be able to beat it through skill, sometimes this game feels more like blind luck.

The sensation of the weapons is just not quite right, in COD 4 if you fire a heavy machine gun it has a certain heft, submachine guns have a different "feel" altogether, it's a hard thing to describe and it can only be minor touches that make it appear so, but it's apparent that WAW hasn't been done with the same care, the guns are all resolutely recoil free, some of the light machine guns give the sensation of firing a multi shot spud gun.

This has been a pretty brutal review so far but I will say that visually this is stunning, the inter level movies are wonderfully done and the whole game is polished to the Nth degree, at times the game can be fun and heck it's well worth a play, but ultimately it's hard to escape the idea that it might be a better game if they'd just remade COD 1 & 2 with modern day visuals. They've made the horror of war sort of dull, which is a shame.

I know a lot of people get vexed by the criticism of Treyarch and consider it unfair, but honestly putting this game against Modern Warfare and the previous PC incarnations of COD in the WW2 arena, all the evidence suggests that Infinity Ward are just better at this sort of thing and quite markedly so.

Review Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next »