Three years ago I decided to catch up on all the CoD games I’ve been missing out on since Black Ops II and it turned out that there were some occasional attempts at making a fun single-player campaign. The one I found most enjoyable, despite it’s dumb QTEs and the still infamous “pay respects” scene, was the Advanced Warfare entry as it had both fun gameplay elements to it and an actually good-ish story. It lacked the really creative “choose your own adventure” ideas from Black Ops II, but storytelling was solid and the characters were memorable, so I had somewhat high hopes for WWII, as it was made by the same team at Sledgehammer Games. I was extremely disappointed.
I’d argue that returning to the setting of the Second World War isn’t a necessarily bad idea. Sure, ever since the original Playstation release of Medal of Honor and up until around 2006 the setting, especially for the FPS titles, got way overused and became quite stale. But such a dramatic event could’ve been covered from new different angles in story-heavy titles such as what CoD single-player campaigns were always about. Yet, WWII does absolutely nothing that any of the previous titles hasn’t done before. It’s a simple predictable story of your typical brave US soldiers going through the grind of war and prevailing in the end despite the odds, with no memorable characters, no interesting stories and at the same time, no purely edutainment value either.
Unlike the memorable campaigns of the first two entries in the series, you don’t even get to see the war from very different perspectives, something that was a staple of CoD originally, only ever switching characters up to give you “a tank level” or a “plane level” that show the almost exact same events just happening slightly to the right. It’s there for variety, not creating interesting situations or drama, just an entry on a “to do” list. Even the stealth mission that most people seem to remember most feels like a slightly updated and not that much more exciting take on the old stealthy missions from the original Medal of Honor from 99, except the documents check is now more involved. It is rather freeroam and is probably the single nice moment in the entire game, but even it doesn’t feel particularly fun and still devolves into predictable turret sections and “hold that position” sequences.
Most of the time Call of Duty: WWII is boring. When it’s not boring it’s annoying, full of “oh no, are they doing the– ugh, they are” moments when you hope that some stupid thing isn’t going to happen, but it always does. It’s full of unnecessary QTEs that never feel needed nor adding any tension. It might be the second most boring entry in the series after Ghosts. As usual, I didn’t check any multiplayer modes, as I don’t care about them (I never wrote about Black Ops IV because it’s all multiplayer), but it’s CoD from several years ago, so no one probably plays it anymore anyway. Call of Duty: WWII is not worth your time.