Activision has failed to show how, as promised, Call of Duty WWII pushes the conversation forward. But this game is travelling a well-worn narrative path. Not every take on WWII needs to be Saving Private Ryan, or present a deep and meaningful meditation on the atrocities of war. But there's little sign that his character goes any deeper than point and shoot. The protagonist, a fresh-faced Texan recruit named Robert "Red" Daniels, is the classic everyday soldier-the Captain Miller of Saving Private Ryan, or the Private Witt of The Thin Red Line. Replace the Brownings and the Winchesters with a modern arsenal, and the blockbuster scenes of the demo could've come from any CoD of the last 10 years.
![cod ww2 automute all cod ww2 automute all](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vkPwDExruJo/maxresdefault.jpg)
Call of Duty WWII is every bit the overblown action movie, but it seems to do little to back up that action with a meaningful plot. In a spectacular ending to the demo, a bell tower-in which the player has been sniping soldiers-begins to collapse, beginning a heart-pounding descent to the bottom of the tower with the aid of a two-ton church bell. The Call of Duty WWII trailer shown at E3 2017.Īn armoured car, driven through town by the Germans, became a point of attack, after which waves of enemy soldiers were mowed down by the car's roof-mounted machine gun. Medics handed over health packs as support (your health no longer automatically regenerates), while a man's torso was bombed to smithereens in glorious technicolour. Buildings were razed to the ground by mortar fire, while the bodies of fallen soldiers were dragged to safety through fields of dismembered limbs. Activision assaulted viewers of the the hands-off demo with expertly choreographed set pieces and wince-worthy headshots. While far from perfect, BF1's mature approach to recreating a century-old conflict remains refreshingly different.Ī similarly "grounded, human, and intimate" campaign is promised for Call of Duty WWII, although it's hard to see where the bombast and spectacle of Activison's E3 demo fits into that. Behind every shot and every death was a reminder that war should rarely be celebrated.
![cod ww2 automute all cod ww2 automute all](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bdTvNC3AjhA/maxresdefault.jpg)
BF1's campaign balanced its glorification of wartime violence with a deeply personal story. EA's Battlefield 1, which is set in WW1, did a fine job of moving back to a historical setting, because it did so in a novel way. The trouble with revisiting WW2, a setting adopted by dozens of different games over the years, is that it's hard to avoid treading water. That's why we now have Call of Duty WWII, a return to the "boots on the ground gameplay" of the original CoD trilogy and to its WWII setting.
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But video games are just as susceptible to the fickle tastes and short memories of the fleshy humans that buy them as films, fashion, and TV shows. Some, like CoD, even looked to the future. With only a few notable exceptions- Call of Duty: World at War and Battlefield 1942 spring to mind-shooters have stuck with the modern setting. It was 2007 when, after a decade of beach-storming and butterfly bombs, Infinity Ward called time on the World War II shooter with the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.