Call of Duty: WWII

Sledgehammer Games

images c/o MobyGames

Despite its reputation as a one-time symbol of the oversaturation of World War II in the shooter genre, Call of Duty has been about anything else for a lot longer than it’s ever been about World War II. Just three short years — 2003 to 2006 — plus one last hurrah in 2008 — and all of a sudden Call of Duty was about modern warfare, or Vietnam, or the wars of the future. The series is over twenty years old now, and yet the perception lingers. But maybe that’s not a bad thing; maybe, as that post-9/11 wave of World War II nostalgia petered out into Obama-era optimism (or paranoia, depending on who you voted for,) we forgot what that war was ever really about. Maybe we need the occasional reminder. I don’t know if Call of Duty: WWII, Sledgehammer’s deliberate throwback released nine years after Call of Duty: World at War saw the end of World War II as a popular theme for shooters, is as high-minded as all that. But it’s trying to say something, something important, underneath all the glossy presentation.

WWII, like much of the rest of the franchise, is very driven by popular film. The early games lifted a lot from the likes of The Longest Day and The Guns of Navarrone, but I think it’s fair to say that they were less about story and more about re-enactment. In this manner they’re not far removed from the Medal of Honor franchise that birthed them, which was always more about vibes, a feeling of authenticity. Things changed with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare; story became more important, in part because its cynical fictionalization of the Iraq War, stripping it of its actual history and causes to subsequently use it for aesthetics, meant there just wasn’t anything to actually re-enact — and so it had to rely on a bespoke story, as stuffed with action-movie cliches from the 1990s as it happened to be. Call of Duty: WWII continues in this action-movie vein; you could look at it, perhaps, as a remake of sorts to Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, with its focus on a single unit, but with bigger characters, a bigger story, bigger emotional moments.

WWII puts the player into the boots of Ronald “Red” Daniels, a conscientious fresh recruit into the United States Army’s 1st Infantry Division, also known as the Bloody First or the Big Red One, who have long played the role of America’s sledgehammer, with the casualty list to prove it. We’re quickly introduced to the primary players: Zussman, the scrappy Jewish kid from Chicago; Aiello, who is Queens, New York’s self-described prodigal son; Stiles, a shutterbug and archetypal nerd most identifiable by his glasses; Turner, a sentimental lieutenant; and last but certainly not least, the alcoholic and mean-spirited Sergeant Pierson. Pierson’s got a deep psychic wound, a failed rescue operation during the Battle of the Kasserine Pass of which he was the only survivor, and he’s sworn to never make a mistake like that again… which makes it everyone else’s problem. As if Daniels didn’t have his own trauma to worry about, an incident in his childhood that has made him the man he is today. Despite mechanics such as being able to rescue downed soldiers from withering enemy fire, WWII is not a story about heroism, but about sacrifice, and the traumas we must overcome to become the best versions of ourselves.

As the story takes us from the D-Day landings all the way to the end of the war, it comes off as a little episodic. Divided up into a series of chapters, some of which seem to go together as two-parters (such as the two chapters set during the Battle of the Bulge) WWII prefers to keep the focus on one small unit, and generally avoids the classic Call of Duty trope of multiple perspectives, with a few small exceptions. One chapter has you playing a French resistance member (one of the few female playable characters in this franchise) infiltrating a fortress full of Nazis for some light espionage and sabotage before switching back to Daniels. We’re also “treated” to tank and airplane segments that, quite frankly, reveal the franchise’s console-first focus, as they control like absolute dogshit on mouse and keyboard (especially the tank, my goodness — and even after I switched to my gamepad, the tank still had seriously unintuitive controls. I don’t know what Sledgehammer were thinking.) These segments, I believe, betray the game’s haphazard development, where it wasn’t clear initially what kind of story they wanted to tell. Given that WWII was the franchise’s first World War II themed game in nine years, Sledgehammer likely felt the temptation to tell the same kind of multi-perspective narrative as Call of Duty 1 or 2, before ultimately narrowing the focus to this tight-knit squad. The French resistance chapters in particular feel awfully out of step tonally with the rest of the game, which only furthers its episodic feel.

In a way, WWII seems to mirror the progression of Band of Brothers, the classic HBO miniseries about the 101st Airborne (and a big influence on the original Call of Duty): introduce a core cast of characters and put them into a variety of situations, sometimes uplifting, sometimes devastating. And to cement this likeness, the final level in the game has the squad come upon the remains of a concentration camp, in the search for Zussman, who had been captured months before. Stuff like this can always be touchy, and the industry has typically long avoided depicting the Holocaust for business reasons. But something’s changed in the post-Wolfenstein: The New Order era. Maybe there’s room now for AAA games to be frank about the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the hateful ideology it espoused, especially as more and more young people, failed by their education system, fall for Holocaust denial; especially as politicians across America and Europe more and more start to sound like the kind of men our ancestors fought. WWII tries to thread a needle between an honest portrayal of the Holocaust and something that wouldn’t alienate the audience too much; ultimately, it settles on having the protagonists discover the Berga concentration camp, a slave labor camp connected to the notorious Buchenwald, where Jewish-American POWs were sent to be worked to death. The prisoners and their captors are gone, but Stiles has his camera, and the squad makes sure to document everything.

Despite this halting, arguably incomplete attempt at a reminder of what World War II was about in the first place, the game itself nevertheless feels a lot like a modern take on an older model of World War II game. Regenerating health? Gone — replaced by medkits that you can use as needed. Your squadmates can give you ammo, medkits or even point out targets for you — you just need to ask them. A few stealth sequences call to mind the earlier Medal of Honor games. It’s even got a Nazi Zombies mode, straight outta World At War, though whether or not it’s canon to Treyarch’s Zombie-verse might be up for interpretation. And of course this is the third Call of Duty game to feature the Bloody First, the first two being the PlayStation 2 spinoffs Finest Hour and Big Red One.

While its story, as cliche-ridden as it sometimes feels (the armored train wreck sequence is brand new levels of absurd even for this franchise) is nevertheless gripping, even emotional, WWII ultimately brings little to the franchise. But that’s okay. Sometimes we just need a reminder of what we’ve forgotten. 

 

  -June <3

Part of a series on Call of Duty 

Call of Duty	United Offensive	Call of Duty 2
Call of Duty 3
Finest Hour	2: Big Red One	Roads to Victory
4: Modern Warfare	Modern Warfare 2	Modern Warfare 3
Modern Warfare DS	Modern Warfare Mobilized	Modern Warfare 3: Defiance
Modern Warfare 2019	Modern Warfare II	Modern Warfare III
Warzone
World At War	WaW: Final Fronts	World At War DS
Black Ops	Black Ops DS	Black Ops: Declassified
Black Ops II	Black Ops III	Black Ops IIII
Black Ops: Cold War	Black Ops 6	Black Ops 7
Ghosts	Advanced Warfare	Infinite Warfare
WWII	Vanguard	???
Zombies