Headquarters is a fine way to kill time when it works At best it’s decorative, like the tinsel on a Christmas tree. But it’s also pretty superfluous, and could easily be handled within menus without requiring that you physically walk up to someone to pick up an objective. It’s an interesting way to kill time as you wait for your buddy to hop online, clearly aping the format of Destiny’s famous Tower. There are mini objectives to pick up for in-game currency and a few side activities, like a firing range and a one vs. we’ll get to that), and you could arguably team up with strangers and even watch them open loot boxes that literally drop from the sky. There has really never been anything like it in Call of Duty, and it gives an interesting social twist to what was formerly just staring at a menu screen. Headquarters is a base of operations that you wander around in third-person view as your multiplayer avatar. The biggest is something called Headquarters (not to be confused with the mode of the same name). Having spent a proper weekend with the multiplayer and Zombies components of Call of Duty: WWII, I can say the franchises’ online roots remain mostly strong, though even die-hards will struggle to defend the minor changes we continue to see from game to game.Ĭall of Duty: WWII’s multiplayer has a number of trimmings that, at first blush, make this feel like a completely new Call of Duty experience. Rather than serve as a reboot, Call of Duty: WWII is more of a redundancy. While it returns to the era of classic Call of Duty, it neither captures the surprise of the early games nor the ambition of modern entries. What would the last 10 years of gameplay, graphical and storytelling advancement bring to scenes that we’ve already experienced? Unfortunately the Call of Duty: WWII campaign is not up to the task, falling into rote cliches and overly familiar territory. The prospect of a modern take on World War II is an exciting one. The game aspires to be like the great WWII films, but is unwilling to go to the lengths those films to do present the truth, as grim and monstrous as it is. The game clearly has no problem showing the all-out slaughter of hundreds of soldiers, some in incredibly gruesome ways, but when it comes to the intimate and targeted horror of concentration camps, Call of Duty: WWII opts for a more antiseptic presentation. The scene is presented as the worst the Nazis could muster, when the truth is, of course, far darker. Call of Duty: WWII addresses it in an actual interactive sequence, but the attempt feels like a pulled punch: showing the terrible treatment of POWs during the war without ever mentioning the slaughter of civilians or the existence of death camps. Traditionally these games have ignored the topic entirely. One of those tough questions is how a game about World War II deals with the Holocaust. Without strong emotional hooks, even major deaths in the game fell flat - a mere hiccup in my conquest to take down the Reich. War movies hinge on the bonds you form with the characters, lending their sacrifice weight and meaning. Unfortunately the rest of the cast manages to blend into a forgettable mash, even though it’s clear that a late-game turn for one of them is designed to show some unearned depth. That bond features prominently throughout the game, in intense heart-to-hearts and bro-ing down. The only character that inspires even a modest emotional response is the kid from Chicago, who becomes your bosom compadre when you save his life in the very first mission. His squadmates include some familiar war story tropes: a nerdy, bespectacled photog a smart-ass, tough-as-nails Jewish kid from Chicago and a gruff, “orders above all else” sergeant played by Josh Duhamel. You play as a private in the famed 1st Division, a country boy from Texas who, between missions, shoots the shit with the boys about girls back home and what they wish they were doing instead of fighting. If you’ve seen Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan or frankly any other World War II flick made during the last 30 years, you’ll be trekking over familiar ground in the Call of Duty: WWII campaign. That desire to tell a realistic, compassionate story is constantly at odds with the desire to make an engaging first-person shooter in which the player cuts through hordes of generic foot-soldiers. In a lot of ways it attempts to reboot the series as a more grounded, more sober military shooter that’s less Michael Bay and more Ken Burns. Call of Duty: WWII is a return to the original recipe, the first game set during the Second World War in 10 years.
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