Call of Duty: World at War

I came into World at War with the same skepticism most shooter players had in late 2008: CoD4 had just rewired our brains with modern loadouts and a prestige system that ate our weekends, and Treyarch's answer was to drag us back to bolt-action rifles and Pacific island jungles. It felt like a step backward on paper. It mostly isn't, but that tension never fully disappears. The campaign splits across two theatres. You play an American Marine grinding through the Pacific against Japanese forces who ambush from foliage and throw banzai charges at your face, then swap to a Soviet soldier pushing from Russia all the way to Berlin. Kiefer Sutherland barks orders on one side, Gary Oldman voices the iconic Sergeant Reznov on the other. The writing is thin compared to CoD4, the infinite enemy spawns are genuinely maddening on Veteran difficulty, and grenade spam is a recurring migraine. But the tone is uncompromising in a way WWII games rarely were at the time. Limbs detach, flamethrowers cook enemies in a way that still lands hard, and the Pacific campaign in particular gave the genre a setting it had badly underused. Four-player co-op through the full campaign was a first for the series, and XP earned there fed directly into your competitive multiplayer rank, which was a smart design loop. Multiplayer runs on the same progression skeleton CoD4 introduced: ranks up to level 65, a prestige system, create-a-class with perks, and killstreak rewards. The WWII retrofit mostly works. Three killstreak rewards land as the Recon Plane at three kills, Artillery strike at five, and attack Dogs at seven. Tank-drivable maps add a vehicle wrinkle that Modern Warfare skipped entirely. Capture the Flag returned after sitting out CoD4, and the War mode, which forces sequential zone captures with momentum swings, is an underrated addition. The matchmaking and host-migration problems that plagued CoD4 followed the game here unchanged, and the team balancing was a joke at launch. Whether the PC servers are in any reliable shape today is a real question worth researching before you spend. Then there is Nazi Zombies. Four players, one starting pistol each, a boarded-up structure, and wave after wave of the undead. You earn points by killing zombies and boarding windows, then spend them to open new areas of the map, pull from the mystery box for a random weapon, or buy wall weapons like the MP40 and Browning. The first map, Nacht der Untoten, is spartan by later standards, but the three DLC maps expanded fast. Verruckt introduced Perk-a-Cola machines and sprinting zombies. Shi No Numa dropped Hellhound rounds and the Wunderwaffe DG-2 into the mix. Der Riese added the Pack-a-Punch upgrade machine and the four iconic playable characters that Treyarch would carry into the Black Ops series. That entire mythos started here. It is a legitimately excellent co-op loop, tense in a way competitive multiplayer rarely replicates, and holds up with friends better than most of the core game does in 2026. For a strictly performance-focused shooter player, World at War is dated. The time-to-kill with bolt-action rifles is uneven, movement tech is minimal compared to anything released in the last five years, and the netcode questions on PC are real. But if you want the origin point of Zombies mode, a campaign you can run with three friends, and a multiplayer that was genuinely as addictive as CoD4 despite recycling most of its bones, the value is hard to argue with at the price this sits at now.

Fred · Scout Team

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