You’re in France, 1944, six weeks on from the Normandy beach landings, and things are about to go badly wrong for the US 1st Infantry division. Allied troops converging on the sleepy French town of Merigny expected minimal resistance from the Germany forces stationed there, but the numbers are greater than reported and they have an armoured machine gun car. Your platoon needs to take the church at the centre of the village, but there’s a hell-storm of bullets and explosions to get through first. As soldiers run past, shouts ring out and explosions make your ears ring, you realise something pretty fast: Call of Duty is back where it began, and where it now seems to belong – amid the chaos of the second world war.
The Merigny encounter forms the basis of the Call of Duty: WWII campaign demo, shown off behind closed doors at E3. In this scene, lead protagonist private Ronald “Red” Daniels and other members of the 1st Infantry Division must edge closer to the town under heavy machine gun fire, creeping from wall to wall for cover and switching between familiar weapons of the era: the M1 Garand, the Karabiner 98K, the MP-40. Your first objective is to overrun the machine gun car then use it to direct suppression fire at soldiers in a nearby house, which eventually collapses under the onslaught causing a cascade of dust and rubble. It’s familiar action movie stuff, harking right back to the first three titles in the series, but there’s one key change: health no longer regenerates automatically – players now have to call for health packs from nearby medics – a feature designed to replicate both the camaraderie and the vulnerability of soldiers.
In the next section of the demo, allied troops have burst into the church, using an M1 grenade launcher to attack troops on a balcony. You’re then clambering up the bell tower to provide overwatch fire as allied soldiers clear out remaining buildings. AI soldiers are able to work as spotters, highlighting enemies for you to target with your sniper rifle – but then an airstrike comes in, hitting the side of the church building and instigating a desperate rush to clear the area. The dramatic, breathless sequence ends with you racing down through the tower as the giant church bells smash slowly through the disintegrating architecture, level by level, constantly threatening to flatten you. It’s a fast, tense escape set-piece, hugely reminiscent of the Crew Expendable mission from Call of Duty 4, where you’re forced to sprint through a sinking ship. And it’s the last we’ll see of the campaign mode until later in the summer.
Multiplayer mayhem
Some of the biggest changes to the Call of Duty experience are in the crucial multiplayer component. First up, instead of standard CoD classes, there are now five different divisions to choose from at the start of a match, each with their own specialist arsenals and abilities. Infantry is the most familiar, but then you get airborne (fast and quiet), mountain (specialising in sharp shooting from a distance), armoured (carrying the heaviest weapons) and the expeditionary force who bring incendiary shells into the mix – all are customisable with new equipment and weaponry. (One cool new thing here: in the menu section, when you’re choosing your load-out, you can go into a little firing range and test the weapons – it’s not a major addition, but it’s really useful.)
Familiar modes like Team Deathmatch and Domination return of course and we tried both out at E3. The former was shown off via a map called Pointe De Hoc, a heavily fortified German base above the Normandy beaches, riddled with trenches and surrounded by burned out farm buildings. The Domination demo took place in Ardennes Forest, a small, circular map, scattered with criss-crossing gullies overlooked by wooden huts, providing a mix of blind corners and sneaky sniping positions.
They’re classic CoD; fast, smooth, loaded with chokepoints, and with a minimum of long sight lines to encourage super close, super deadly encounters. Sledgehammer has also been careful to vary the gradients of landscapes and the heights of buildings so we’re getting the verticality that jetpacks and wall runs brought to the last few CoD instalments.
The most interesting new mode though is war, a multi-objective team-based challenge, in which one side has to push through a series of tasks, while the other defends each position. In our demo, the attacking side had to first raid an enemy base located in a French mansion, before repairing the bridge leading over a narrow ravine, destroying an ammunition stockpile before finally taking out an anti-aircraft battery at the edge of town. Attackers are given a set time to complete each task – if they fail, the defenders win.
It sounds a lot like the rush mode in Battlefield, but in practice it’s more interesting and multifaceted. Each objective requires real teamwork rather than just one or two skilled loners. To repair the bridge, for example, two or three players have to put themselves directly in enemy range for several seconds, which requires judicious use of smoke bombs as well as suppression and sniper fire. In the stockpile section, the explosives had to be set and then guarded as the timer ticks down, and this means covering all the entrances to the area. At the same time, defenders have to co-operate to build barriers and gun emplacements as quickly as possible. It’s a relentless, brutal challenge, requiring flexibility and planning, and it really changes the tone and feel of the CoD online experience. (Update: as one reader has pointed out, it’s also very similar to the Operations mode in Killzone 3.)
Score-streaks, meanwhile, are independent of divisions, allowing players to fine tune their own personal setups. You can call in fighter plane strafes, mortar attacks and carpet bombing, as well as unlocking a flamethrower and requesting a paratrooper assault, which brings a squad of AI soldiers surging on to the map – an option similar to the Attack Dogs kill-streak in World at War.
Is Call of Duty: WWII a return to past glories? In some ways, yes. Obviously, with the jet packs and laser weapons gone, we’re back to very familiar weapons, traversal options and engagement patterns, and the muscle memory of those classic titles is very much still there. But the new additions – the health packs, the war mode, the refreshed score-streaks, etc, together with some truly spectacular visual spectacles – make this creaking franchise kind of new and exciting again. Battlefield 1 got there first of course, but WWII takes a very different approach to historic conflict, the emphasis on intensity, on short-range encounters, on speed and response, all taking us right back to the defining elements of the series.
Some people are tired of Call of Duty and everything it represents in the industry, but others will always be willing to get swept back in, to swallow their misgivings about war as interactive entertainment, and buckle down to hours of paintball-like pleasure. Call of Duty: WWII is going to be for them.
- Call of Duty: WWII is released on PC, PS4 and Xbox One on 3 November. A private multiplayer beta is running later in the summer.
