Call of Duty: World at War (

2008

) ½

There is a tendency among otherwise cynical and realistic commentators to romanticize WWII. While it's true that the conflict was about as close to a straightforward battle of good versus evil as mankind is ever likely to get in a major war, the fact remains that it was the most brutal and cruel war in the long history of brutal and cruel wars. That it served a noble purpose, defeating the Nazis and ushering in the long peace, should not blind us to all the myriad atrocities (big and small) that were committed on all sides. Sure, like all wars there are plenty of moments of individual heroism and humanity that shine through the grimdark milieu. Yet we are lying to ourselves if we say that these moments truly represent the war and all its horrors. WWII, like all wars and perhaps a good deal more than most, is a tale of man's inhumanity towards his fellow man. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it is the greatest inhumanity that mankind has ever inflicted on itself. So, if a WWII shooter is going to be at all honest about the period of history it is depicting it should be as much a horror story and a tale of heroism. The cruelty and the heroism of the period are inextricably linked. As far as I know, no games really get it right. No games except for Call of Duty: World at War that is.

The game is aided in this endeavor by keeping both parts of its campaign far removed from the familiar battlefields of Western Europe. There is no Normandy invasion or Battle of the Bulge. Instead, you divide your time between island hopping in the Pacific as USMC Private Miller and fighting with the Red Army on the Eastern front as Dimitri Petrenko. The Eastern front in particular is a criminally underutilized setting for WWII games, especially when you realize that it was there that the bulk of the killing and dying took place. Besides, I'm always up for a bit of positive Slav representation in gaming, especially in a series that frequently uses them as stock antagonists. The vast majority of the Russian campaign takes place during the final days of the war in Europe, as the Red Army grinds its way through the last lines of defense around the German capital. Indeed, it plays like a mirror image of the Russian campaign in Call of Duty [2003], with one opening mission in Stalingrad and the rest in Berlin and the surrounding area.

The two campaigns are highly complementary. The American campaign stars a bunch of stoic blocks of wood with no personalities to speak of, yet it has most of World at War's unique gameplay mechanics. Japanese soldiers set ambushes for you, play dead to launch sneak attacks, snipe at you from trees, and when shit really hits the fan leap into a suicidal banzai charge. The Imperial Japanese proclivity for close quarters, hand-to-hand fighting is on full display here and you'll find that melee attacks, bayonets, and flamethrowers are all much more valuable than in your typical Call of Duty campaign. The Russian campaign is more by the books in terms of action but has much more compelling characters especially your immediate commander Victor Reznov. Reznov sees the war with Germany less as a conflict between nations and more as an opportunity for personal vengeance, a chance to even the score with the Germans who ravaged his country and killed his father. Hence the title of the first Russian mission: “Vendetta.” Of course, the pursuit of vengeance is a double-edged sword, and invariably corrodes the conscience of those who chase it. A fact that Call of Duty: World at War is keenly aware of.

This is where the most remarkable element of Call of Duty: World at War comes into play, it's an unwillingness to coddle the viewer with pleasant lies about heroes and villains. The Nazis are monstrous, of course, and we see their monstrosity first hand (the first German in the campaign is seen executing wounded Russian soldiers with the same bored methodicalness that most people bring to their day job on a Monday morning). Yet in your quest for vengeance against them, you will in turn be called upon to inflict the same cruelties that you have endured. This is the only WWII shooter I've played where not only does killing surrendering enemies not give you a game-over screen, in one instance the game goes so far as to mandate that you kill them all before you can proceed with the story! I suspect that the Russian campaign would have benefited from the mechanic in Call of Duty: WW2 [2017] where enemy soldiers would surrender if they were sufficiently softened up.

This commitment to capturing the full obscenity, cruelty, and madness of the war is present in both campaigns but really takes center stage in the Russian campaign, particularly the apocalyptic scenes towards the end of the game. The dead litter the ruin streets, corpses of deserters hang from the lamp posts, and the air is thick with smoke and the constant humming of exploding shells. Adding to the atmosphere of unapologetic obscenity is the brief cinematics that play before the start of each level, a combination of newsreel footage from the period and slick infographics that helpfully inform you of the horrific human toll of the conflict and give you real-life images of the horror of war.

Despite the bleak tone, World at War does not become a simplistic “war is hell” story, rather it strives to capture the full human range of the conflict. War is indeed terrible but depicting it as an unending parade of torments is just as dishonest as saying it is a purely heroic activity. There are heroic rescues, thrilling battles, and moments of levity intermixed with the oppressive horror of the situation. One of the most memorable moments in the entire campaign comes at the end of the ninth mission: Ring of Steel. After a tough fight through the suburbs of Berlin, fighting entrenched enemies and slowly clearing them out house by house, room by room, you finally breakthrough and the T-34s start to roll through the main streets. It's at this point that heroic opera music begins to play, and the meager German defenses begin to crumble before the Russian advance. As the Germans melt away, the Commissar overseeing the invasion begins to make a speech, telling the German survivors to “Abandon your posts, abandon your homes, abandon your hope!” Had this sequence been the start of the level it would have had little impact, but following, as it does, the end of a very slow and challenging gauntlet makes it feel spectacular. You feel like a god of war, driving your enemies before you and laughing at their helplessness. Of course, this is not a simple power fantasy, and the first section of the next level shatters this feeling of invincibility when a faint version of the same heroic opera plays over the radio just before a German ambush sends you back to the brutal grind of clearing the city of all resistance, house by house and room by room. Such is the fickle nature of Force.

Of course, World at War is far from perfect. Mechanically, the game suffers from all the same issues that it's immediate predecessor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007], did. I have never liked the regenerating health system in Call of Duty games, ever since it was first introduced in Call of Duty 2 [2005]. Just show my health bar in the upper corner, please! I'm sick of the screen turning red and making it hard to see what's going on right when I need to the most. The veteran difficulty setting is effectively unplayable because of how many grenades the enemy soldiers can throw at you. Hell, this aspect is even worse than in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare [2007], as at least with that one I could get through a few missions albeit with an embarrassing number of continues. Here, I couldn't even get off of Peleliu Island in the American campaign. The game also has a few issues all its own, most notably the fact that my squadmates are constantly hogging all the good cover for themselves or pushing me out of the way as I try to get into position. It's not like these guys are contributing to the fight in any meaningful way, they're just there for set dressing half the time. Get the fuck out of my way and let me win this war!

Even in terms of showing the player the full unflinching horror of war, World at War falls agonizingly short. Sure, it may be the most truthful and cruel depiction of WWII I've seen in a mainstream video game, but the reality on the ground is far too obscene to fit comfortably into anything approaching entertainment. The most glaring omission is that there is no depiction or even significant mention of the German death camps that the Red Army liberated. Unlike Wolfenstein: The New Order [2014], World at War is a game whose general tone would support the inclusion of such a sequence. If working in a concentration camp into the game's story would be too difficult, surely we could have a sequence where Dimitri is captured and sent to one of the hellish POW camps where the Germans kept captured Russians. The German soldiers in the latter part of the German campaign also don't look right, in a way I don't doubt is intended to protect the sensibilities of the player. One cut scene tells us that Hitler's army is reduced to the young, the old, and the weak. Yet the models of the German soldiers we fight all look like standard military-aged men. Where are the pitiful graybeards? Where are the thousands of child soldiers that were deployed in the final defense of Berlin? I'll confess that I have little desire to shoot my way through an army of children and their grandfathers, but this is certainly an example of the game pulling its punches.

Finally, we have one more glaring omission to the full picture of historical horror: We never see any Soviet soldiers rape anyone. During the Soviet invasion of Germany, millions of German women were raped by the invading army. Of course, you can't move millions of men around without a few of them getting out of hand and committing a wide array of crimes. It's not like there were no cases of rape, murder, and robbery on the Western front and or in the Pacific. The difference with the Red Army's invasion of Germany was a matter of scale as well as the tacit approval from the high command. Russian soldiers were more or less given license to “have their fun” with the enemy's women, in what may have been a deliberate attempt to use terror and cruelty to demoralize the Germans. Depicting this in a game tastefully is difficult, even in 2008 when everything wasn't under the microscope of a few easily offended, unsanctioned social-commissars. Yet, I think something could have been done on the sidelines of one of the Berlin missions, perhaps a group of Russian soldiers surrounding a helpless German girl laughing and jeering at her misery before the sight vanishes behind a closed door. Still, I don't fault Treyarch for avoiding this particular bramble bush, especially when they did such a sterling job in capturing the horror and inhumanity of the setting.