Call of Duty WWII

Call of Duty WWII has the series returning to its roots, but also once more playing too safe to have any impact. Offering a derivative campaign that fails at developing characters and themes, and a bunch of multiplayer modes that any series veteran will have already played hundreds of times, the game’s lack of ambition is the only thing that ends up standing out in the package.

The campaign is centered around Ronald Daniels, a farm boy from Texas – who is as interesting as that sounds – who goes to war against the Nazis because he wants to live up to his big brother’s tough attitude. One day, when he was just a kid, his brother was being bitten by a wolf, and Daniels couldn’t take the shot at the animal. Therefore, now we follow him and his platoon through Europe, beginning with D-Day and ending with Germany’s occupation, where he’ll make sure to shoot every Nazi on his path.

WWII’s narrative is rife with clichés, believing that just throwing them around without any sort of development will suffice. Daniels’ platoon has the usual suspects: there is the one who looks and speaks like a nerd, the one who eventually becomes the protagonist’s best friend, the boss who is very tough on the outside but a bit soft on the inside, and so on. However, with the exception of the latter – Sergeant William Pierson – they have no personality whatsoever. Take Daniels’ best friend, Zussman, as an example: his main traits are speaking German and being a Jew; he becomes the protagonist’s friend just because Daniels saved his life at the beginning – and the game even uses his Jewish lineage to force a couple of scenes into the story set in concentration camps.

The developers are unable to balance the tone of the story, mixing some heavy scenes, dialogues, and subject matter with goofy set pieces, outlandish events, and poor writing. At one scene, the protagonist says he’s going to be okay and then slowly examines his bloody hands with horror, but at another, he’s trying to stop a moving train with a jeep. At one moment, the game will have a character take pictures of a deserted concentration camp, which will show on the screen with a heavy sound effect, but at the next, it will have you believe that the camp’s only survivor is precisely the character Daniels is looking for. The result of this mismatch is that the heavy scenes – there’s even a scene in which a German officer rejoices at murdering a character’s son – become devoid of meaning, being there only for shock value.

Good writing would have gone a long way in remedying this issue but, sadly, the dialogues in the game are either cheap one-liners that have been done to death (“You’re are a long way from Texas, farm boy”) or simply nonsensical gibberish. There’s a scene, for example, in which Zussman claims he’s ready to go back into the fray after spending a couple of weeks resting due to a stab wound. Sergeant Pierson, then, appears and doubts if Zussman is really ready, proceeding to hit the guy’s wound just to prove a point. And later he says, “The only thing more dangerous than the enemy is pride,” which sounds cool but doesn’t make a lot of sense: it compares Nazis with the desire to help despite the risks; it goes against their division’s repeated motto of “No sacrifice too great”; and even fails to lead anywhere since the narrative quickly forgets about the wound, making nothing happen to Zussman because of it: he doesn’t endanger himself or his platoon because of the wound. The narrative is quick to abandon threads: Daniels may look traumatized when he’s observing his bloody hands, but by the end, when his future back to America is envisioned, its sunny, beautiful, and PTSD-free, when Daniel’s only problem is regret regarding one specific decision.

Despite this kind of dialogue, Pierson is the only interesting character in WWII, being immensely helped by Joe Duhamel’s performance: the Sargent is an asshole who seems to feel the need to torment his men, but Duhamel makes him sound awfully tortured while chastising them, as if Pierson is aware that what he’s doing is wrong, and this act is consuming his soul – a decision that makes sense after the obvious twist at the end.

There are some glimpses of greatness in the campaign, as when the characters begin to understand that to do what’s right sometimes they have to disobey orders, or when Pierson’s hostile attitude starts to spiral down and make him sound more and more like a complete madman – which increases the tension and the stakes. And, if most missions are the standard fare of the genre – they mix shootouts with sniper sessions, bland stealth parts, and set-pieces where you drive a vehicle or pilot a plane – there’s one that stands out for its unique premise. It’s called “Liberation” and is set in a Nazi-occupied Paris, where the playable character suddenly shifts from Daniels to a French woman who must infiltrate a hotel: here the player must decorate her cover story to answer correctly when questioned by guards. The mission doesn’t quite push the consequences of failing too far – you get a game-over screen or a character appearing to cover up for you – and feels more like something from a Wolfenstein game, but it offers nonetheless a glimpse of what Call of Duty could be if it just dared a bit more.

After all, for most of the time, WWII sticks to the playbook, with its uninspired levels and overused set-pieces. After the fourth building collapses it starts to become dull – which is a great word to describe most of the campaign, as the characters that tag alone during the battles are often not even introduced properly before they are shot in the face, giving the player little reason to care about their deaths.

On the other hand, it’s worth mentioning that health generation is finally gone during the campaign, which is another callback to the first games in the series, and serves to increase the tension of the firefights, discouraging players from just storming ahead without thinking twice since it leaves them with low-health during an extended period of time. To heal, the player must find and use health packs or request them from Zussman – which is a nice touch since it makes him constantly return the favor of Daniels saving him. Other characters in the platoon also have a specific ability attached to them – Pierson can mark enemies on the map, for example – which makes the player more aware of their presence during battles. It’s a pity, then, that the cutscenes fail to develop Daniels’ entire platoon, limiting them to easily recognizable characteristics: Lieutenant Turner, for instance, cares about the welfare of his men more than anything else and that’s all there is to him.

WWII multiplayer offerings are not very original either. There are plenty of modes, as usual, like Team Deathmatch and Domination, and Nazi Zombies makes a comeback as well – where you must survive waves of enemies while solving small puzzles in a big interactive map with a character played by some famous face, like David Tennant – although if you don’t buy the DLC there’s just one map. Also lacking in variety is the game’s best mode, simply called War, where you are put in a level that expands as objectives are completed, making for long and tense battles. There are only three maps for it though, which makes the whole thing get old fast, although there’s one that truly shines.

Set during the Normandy invasion, the level works better than its equivalent mission in the campaign for several reasons. The assault on the beach, for instance, is not scripted anymore, and the enemy fire coming from the bunkers becomes much more overwhelming as it now comes from other players – and most of the soldiers you see getting shot are not paper-thin NPCs, but your teammates. There are two bunkers to take with three main options of tackling them: with Bunker A, you can build a staircase that leads directly into it, which drives the action to non-stop close-quarters firefights, while with Bunker B you build the staircase in a passage beside it, which will become flooded with enemy snipers going prone and waiting for your head to pop up. Meanwhile, in the middle, there’s a small passage that leads to both bunkers and can be blasted opened – or constantly rebuilt if you’re playing as the Nazis, which is also fascinating, as manning the machine guns in the bunkers really transmits the barbarity of the whole event, as anywhere you shoot you will probably hit someone. And that is just the map’s first stage.

Finally, we have the Headquarters, which serves as a social hub, an area where you meet other players and, open the game’s loot boxes – which are as limiting, infuriating, and greedy as they tend to be.

Call of Duty WWII may be a return to the series’ roots, but it’s not a return to form. With an unimaginative campaign and lackluster multiplayer, the game fails to make an impression.

June 03, 2020.