I know the game has been released for a few months now, but I just starting playing it a few weeks ago and now that I’ve had some time with it I decided to give you my review.  First let me start by saying I’ve played all the Call of Duty games prior except for CoD3 since it wasn’t on the PC.  I’m a huge huge fan of the series and absolutely loved CoD4: Modern Warfare, however something must of happened to me between CoD 2 and World at War because I don’t like it at all, borderline hating it.

For those of you familiar with the CoD series, this starts out the same as any other.  You’re put into a squad of troops and have to complete objectives to proceed through the game.  I guess back when CoD 1 & 2 were released (2003 & 2005) the fact that you proceed through the game in a very linear fashion didn’t bother me as much as when I started playing World at War.   CoD5 uses the same linear approach to their maps which by now is old and played out.  As a gamer I’ve been getting used to playing games with open world maps with multiple options of attack and CoD5 does not provide any of this.  In fact it seems like all it wants to do it put you into bottle neck situations where you have no where to run or hide and you’re forced to shoot your way out of it.   I can’t tell you how many times I tried to take cover behind a tree next to me only to be denied by an invisible wall.

Personally I got feed up with the game and quit playing a little past the sniper maps, then decided to give it a go an multiplayer.  Multiplayer fares much better than the single player campaign, however it is now without its troubles.  CoD5 has all the game types you would find in many of the other CoD games, however I felt that the maps weren’t as well designed as in the past.  Aside from the maps, I hated the new leveling system.  Basically it tries to add a RPG element where everytime you kill someone you get XP to open new weapons or features.  Then when you reach the max level, they decided to add “Prestige” where basically you give up your levels and opened options and start over, but you get a Prestige icon for your character.  Since there are 10 level of Pretige that means you have to level your character 10 times to reach the real max.  For me I level once and stopped there, Prestige is an option that you don’t need to do, so I didn’t.  I’d rather have all the weapons and features open to me that some meaningless Prestige icon.  However other players didn’t have the same thought and servers were created that would give massive amounts of XP for kills so you can level extremly quickly.

Would I recommend Call of Duty: World at War?  I guess it depends on the person.  If you don’t mind an extremely linear game experience then go for it, the weapons, sound FX, graphics are all great.  But if you’re looking for a game that gives you more freedom, I’d pass on this, you’ll just end up getting frustrated.