Call of Duty: WWII - Gold Edition

I've put enough hours into boots-on-ground shooters to know exactly what COD: WWII is trying to do, and for the most part it pulls it off with more confidence than the series deserved after years of sci-fi drift. Sledgehammer Games made a deliberate call: no jetpacks, no wall-running, no exo-suits. You move at infantry pace, you duck behind cover, and the D-Day opening sequence hits you like a truck before the game has even finished loading your save. That first mission alone is one of the most viscerally intense things the franchise has put in front of players, anchoring everything that follows in an old-school tension the series had forgotten it was capable of. The campaign runs through the European theater - Normandy, the Hurtgen Forest, the Rhine - and follows a small squad of American soldiers whose dynamics drive what little emotional weight the story manages to carry. The squad-dependency mechanic is a genuinely clever design choice: your squadmates supply you with ammo, health, and grenades, so keeping them close has tangible mechanical value rather than just narrative flavour. The story itself is uneven. The characters are serviceable but underdeveloped, and a French Resistance infiltration level stands out as a highlight precisely because everything around it is safe, familiar corridor-shooting territory. The campaign clocks in at around seven hours on veteran difficulty, which is short even by COD standards, and the pacing collapses at the end. Multiplayer is where the Gold Edition earns its keep for most players. The return to traditional run-and-gun with period-authentic weapons - BARs, STG-44s, Thompsons, bolt-action Springfields - feels grounded in a way the series hadn't been for years. The Headquarters social hub is a neat concept, a shared space to inspect gear, open supply drops, and squad up, though it can feel cluttered on first approach. The War mode is the genuine standout: team-based, objective-driven missions that play more like a squad FPS than a traditional COD mode, and they work well. The Gold Edition's DLC 1 (The Resistance) adds three extra multiplayer maps and a new War mission called Operation Intercept, which extends the mode's best ideas into resistance-themed European locales. Nazi Zombies rounds out the package with The Final Reich map and, via the DLC, The Darkest Shore. The Zombies mode here is objective-based rather than pure survival camping, which divides the community down the middle - fans of the older wave-defence formula may find the constant task-switching annoying, but there's real depth and plenty of secrets if you lean into it. The PC version specifically carries a more mixed Steam reputation than the console releases, largely driven by multiplayer matchmaking frustrations and the in-app purchase ecosystem around supply drops. The core shooting is not the problem; the meta around it can be. Bottom line: if you want a COD that respects its own history and delivers a cinematic campaign alongside genuinely fun multiplayer modes without demanding you already own a season pass, the Gold Edition is the version worth picking up. The short campaign and familiar mission design will test patient players, but the War mode and the Zombies content give it legs well beyond the credits.

Alex · Scout Team

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