Better than Modern Warfare. Short, but a true Call Of Duty game. Fun in WW2 once again.
+ Probably the best water graphics ever
+ Large amount of weapons
+ Finally a WW2 game involving the Japan Empire around the pacific in a good way
+ Flamethrower!
+ Detailed characters
+ Better than Modern Warfare
+ Gives a great feeling before battles with well done speeches
+ Realistic Dismemberment and blood/gore Quality
Cons:
- Some sounds are terrible
- There are many weapons but you will not get many chances to use all of them
- Quite short
- Some parts are ripped right out of WW2 films
For the record, this review is based only on the single-player experience.
Story:
World At War focuses on the initial battles of World War II in the Pacific and Eastern Europe involving the United States, the Empire of Japan, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany. It is told from the perspectives of a Marine Raider and a Red Army soldier and is based on several historical battles, including the Makin Island raid, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Peleliu, the Battle of the Seelow Heights, the Battle of Okinawa, and the Battle of Berlin. While the story is like in all WW2 games where the ones who won wins and the ones who lost loses, they have added an impressive way of describing each battle before you are sent into it. Before every level, you are introduced to your missions by your commander while real video footage of WW2 is played in the background. At times the game feels a bit Russian nationalistic though.
Graphics:
The graphics in World At War are clearly improved since modern warfare, even though they share the same engine. Every thing is more detailed and vegetation looks better.
Animations are amazing and both weapons and characters are extremely detailed.
But the best part must be the water, if any game could come close to beat Crysis in water quality it would be World At War. The water is at extremely high resolution and the water reflections are awesome.
I did notice some graphical glitches though but nothing major.
Only bad thing about the visuals in World At War is the the developers clearly tried to improve performance by giving things that are less noticeable bad textures and very little detail.
On the other hand, those textures that were good had some great bump mapping, lots of sharpened normal maps and high quality height and specular maps.
Gameplay:
The gameplay in World At War is pretty much like in the other Call of duty games in WW2, you might need to secure a base, defend your position from tanks or just shoot your way to the end.
World At War has many weapons, from pistols, shotguns and sniper rifles to bolt-action rifles, semi-automatic rifles and deployable machineguns. Most Will you be using standard infantry weapons like the M1 Garand, Kar98K or PPsh-41. But there are also less common guns such as double barreled shotguns, rocket launchers and flamethrowers.
You can only carry 2 guns and recover health by taking cover and staying away from gunfire, just like in most COD games, you can also throw back grenades like in modern warfare.
And just the flamethrower is a big part of the gameplay, you will get to use it a few times while paying a part of the US assault. You will however face a lot of Germans using it against you while playing as a Russian soldier. while using it, you can burn enemies and watch them slowly suffer to death, brutal uh? It overheats fast but since you can just spray the fire in the face of enemies and watch them run around burning while it cools down, it is not that much of a problem. You usually get to use the flamethrower to burn people hiding in trenches and such but also to get rid of those hiding in palms.
There are also some vehicle sections of the game, during one part you will get to fire a 20mm turret from a fighter plane while at another time you get to drive a tank that has both a canon and a flamethrower, that can both be used at the same time.
There are also different types of grenades that you use depending on who you play as. As a US soldier you got Frag Grenades and Smoke Grenades, while as a Russian soldier you got Stiel Hand-Grenades and Molotov Cocktails.
And finally the intense and realistic gore. Every time you shoot enemies with a strong weapons blood will spurt everywhere and limbs will fly away. If you blast someone with a shotgun from close range it might just leave a bloody headless torso. Grenades makes arms and legs fly off everywhere and after large battles there probably are only dismembered trashed body's left in a pool of blood and burnt meat.
Sound:
The quality of the sound is mixed. Voices are great but certain weapons sounds just awful.
Overall i would sy the sound is just simply good enough.
Replay value:
Since the game is fun and there are many difficulties there are well enough reasons to replay the game. Most since you can only carry 2 weapons and always finds yourself with 3 rare ones.
And since the game i a little short you will eventually feel that it should have been longer. And then it can be fun to replay the game atleast once to make it last longer.
If you want WW2 game filled with action then World At War will not disappoint. If you do not want an action-filled WW2 game, then look for something else.