The visual style of the game is still impressive.
We all sat down to play cooperatively, with four of us teaming up at once to play in one of the levels called Hard Landing, where you must work your way through a swamp to capture a Japanese airship. Things start off quietly but become hairy quite quickly as enemies leap out of the forest completely in shrubbery camouflage, wielding knives and automatic weapons. Fighting off this ambush is merely the opening scene in this level which ends up taking you through the swamps and out into a large battlefield where you must use rocket launchers and other heavy artillery to take out enemy tanks. So, this is definitely Call of Duty then, and it's all feeling very familiar at this stage.
It's not all so 'samey' though. There are some new weapons to be played with in the game, and while they're not necessarily new to the genre all together, they make a fairly solid impact on the world of Call of Duty. Molotov cocktails for example are good fun to light and then throw at your enemies, causing them to suffer a fiery death before your very eyes. Another favourite that we maybe had a little too much fun using is a very powerful flamethrower, which is handy for burning through foes as they scream in a torturous fashion and melt before your very eyes. OK, so things are definitely a little more intense this time around. Cleverly, the flamethrower can be used to burn away annoying shrubbery that is often used by enemy snipers as a form of camouflage, so the weapon is useful to make things clearer as well as being effective in laying waste to your foes.
Playing cooperatively throughout the mission certainly did seem like more fun; of course, playing together always creates a more squad-like atmosphere and this is no exception. The intensity is ramped up a couple of notches due partly to the fact that shooting one of your fellow players will cause them to die which triggers a reset of the area (marked off by regular checkpoints). It's certainly good in theory, but while being very realistic also can make things difficult because four trigger-happy players trying to differentiate between team-mates and similarly-coloured enemies can be much more complicated than you'd expect. With all of our amazing FPS skills, our team of four took several attempts just to move past the first initial section of the level, as we kept killing each other in different unintentional ways. If you are shot down by an enemy however, a team-mate can revive you by simply standing over you and holding down a button for a few seconds; that's if they get to you quick enough. Again, it's not necessarily a new idea to be able to revive your squad, but it's good to see it here and adds a little bit more depth to the cooperative game.
Pretty.
Similarly to Modern Warfare, we were very impressed with the visuals in the game. Environments are incredibly detailed, there's a lot happening on screen at one time with no slowdown and the whole experience is combined together very nicely with the audio in the game to really create that 'war-like' experience that the developers are always aiming for. World at War is supposedly going to be the most brutal and exciting World War II game to date, and with production values as high as this, things certainly seem to be heading in that direction.
The biggest 'issue' that could be seen with Call of Duty: World at War is that it really feels like a Call of Duty game; not so much in that loving 'ahh, it feels just like home' way, but almost in the sense that it really does seem like Call of Duty 4, just placed in a different setting. It plays almost identically, and while this isn't necessarily a criticism at this stage, it just means that the game feels much more like a side-step rather than the massive leap forward that was provided with Modern Warfare. Whether this proves to be a blessing or a curse when the game ships in November is an entirely different question - we'll just have to wait and see.
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