Reviewing The Last Great WWII FPS

wow synthetic man is sunk to a new low reviewing a call of duty game yes i'm just as shocked as you are apparently i have no integrity left but yeah with call of duty vanguard about to release i thought why not take a look back to what was quite possibly the last great world war ii shooter if you find that title hyperbolic well clearly you're new to the channel you'll get used to it at the very least i think we can agree it is the last great call of duty world war ii shooter not even cod fans like to talk about that other game that released a few years ago but yeah with vanguard about to come out and likely is going to be a complete [ __ ] fest whether it's for the very likely disgraceful campaign that's going to use the excuse of fantasy world war ii or world war 2.5 i don't know to push political propaganda and i'm just gonna place this bet now i bet the russian sniper chick is gonna kill hitler herself that's that's just my personal bet assuming in this alternate timeline he didn't kill himself already i don't know or it could be because the multiplayer is going to be a carbon copy of modern warfare 2019's we already know it's using the same engine it's using the same gunsmith which looks absolutely ridiculous with the firearms of the time period i mean come on cursed guns doesn't even begin to describe these but to get back to the subject at hand obviously i'm talking about world at war to tie in with vanguard and let's just see if it's as good as people hyped it up to be i definitely would never describe myself as a fan of call of duty but fortunately or unfortunately i played quite a few of them it's pretty much unavoidable especially if you were a teenager at the time when these games were becoming popular like i was so before we get into this do the things the algorithm likes you all know what that means liking commenting and of course feel free to dislike and write an angry comment especially regarding the title because that never gets old in any case thank you for the engagement let's kill some real nazis so what is my experience with world at war before this review basically just zombies me and my brother were the youngest in our extended family and i wasn't allowed to play rated m games regularly until i was probably like 15 or 16. so my only experience with this game is cod zombies and that was through playing it with some of my older cousins and yeah i had a pretty good time this was the first introduction of zombies into the series as many of you know and we'll get to that later but first we're going to talk about the campaign because if you're playing this game in 2021 you're probably just gonna do it for zombies or the campaign and that's it the multiplayer is basically broken on steam it creates some kind of weird user default profile for online when you start up the game every time without fail and even if you delete this pre-made profile you can't launch the game through its standard exe in its folder for some reason and this pre-made profile in the files doesn't let you create an online profile i have no idea why that's just how it works so there may be some other fix for this honestly i don't care because the main fix that you likely know about if you play older call of duty games on pc is plutonium plutonium is essentially an unofficial server host and also modding platform i think technically it's also piracy so take caution i guess they host world at war black ops 2 and modern warfare 3 servers if you ever wanted to play those games again i didn't bother downloading plutonium because frankly this is a dead game very few people actually use plutonium as it is and even less of them are playing world at war compared to modern warfare 3 or black ops 2. so yeah if you were looking for a review of the multiplayer look elsewhere i'm a single player guy anyway but i promise you i will talk about multiplayer in vanguard and later battlefield and halo so with that out of the way let's talk about the campaign now at face value this is honestly just another call of duty campaign roughly six hours extremely linear fighting waves of enemies seemingly by yourself as your ai partners do very little where your allies are basically just for show yeah you can witness them getting a few kills it's not battlefield 4 bad but there's also elements like regenerating health sprinting drop shotting though fortunately going prone actually kicks you out of ads so you can't do the full drop shot which for the sake of slight realism i prefer there's also some set pieces but this game actually handles the set pieces intelligently by molding them with the gameplay for example there's an early level in the pacific theater where you have to blow up some tanks with a bazooka meanwhile you've got a bunch of your own allied tanks beside you there's trenches there's enemy japanese snipers on the other end of the field and the constant loud gunfire and explosions really immerses you in this scene and it feels organic it's not a cutscene that you watch and you get bored because who cares we've seen it all by now no this is back when set pieces actually made sense back when set pieces were actually part of the gameplay and not put into cut scenes or hidden behind quick time events to give you the appearance of interactivity no they happen when you are fully in control of the game as they should aside from that most of the elements are pretty standard so where does world at war stand out well a lot of it i'd say comes down to presentation the first thing you'll notice is that during the mission briefing you're showing real war footage and photographs which i think is a really nice touch and feels respectful to world war ii and i'm not going to pretend to be a historian by any stretch but it definitely adds to the atmosphere it makes us feel a little bit more immersive it also sets the tone appropriately for the story which maybe i'm just really desensitized to violence but honestly isn't that dark it shows some of the horrors of war but it doesn't dwell on it we know the atrocities the germans committed everybody's entitled to their opinion i say 6 million he says 600 and some of the insane and literally suicidal tactics the japanese employed but the former is not really shown at all and that's probably for the best the point of the eastern front side of the story has nothing to do with the holocaust it's more of a tale of cruelty on both sides which you might not realize in the moment because you're so hyped up to be defeating the nazis but the game outright shows you at multiple moments that when the russians turn the tide they are more than willing to treat their enemies as less than humans just like the nazis did which i suppose was the moral of this story another big credit to this game's immersion is dismemberment this is probably the most gore that was ever in a call of duty game and there's no way they're ever going to return to that level of gore again because let's be frank these games are made for children yes you can see that rated m on the label but these games are played more by children than nintendo games and yes this is not any kind of unique revelation many people have pointed this out but i just find it hilarious when somebody will say something like oh a hat in time is a baby game what are the actual babies playing they're playing call of duty in fortnite i rest my case but regardless the dismemberment in this game is actually pretty awesome only a select few guns can do it usually the guns you would expect to do it like the mg-42 and there's actually an anti-tank rifle in this game the ptrs-41 yeah that actually can blow people's chests open which is [ __ ] awesome and again it doesn't take a whole lot to bring in that realism angle but yeah if you get hit by a 14.5 millimeter which is larger than a 50 cal by the way i'm 99 certain that would explode your head yes okay firing and there's a lot of little moments some of which are scripted some of which aren't where some of your comrades will just get sniped in the head and die right in front of you and it's kind of sweet especially when it's not scripted it really immerses you in that war experience i know i'm supposed to think this is super tragic and horrifying you know something like spec ops the line but i just think it's awesome so you can't talk about a call of duty game without talking about the gun play of course it's a big part of what got this series popular in the first place and it's been refined to near perfection in recent years but traveling all the way back to 2008 things were a little bit different these guns are just kind of all over the place some have recoils some don't and this is within the same gun category and you think it's done for balance purposes like oh maybe the guns with less recoil do less damage not really for example the ppsh-41 or papa shaw has a 71 round drum magazine 1250 rpm and zero recoil and it's more than good enough to kill enemies maybe it does less damage in the multiplayer i don't know but what i do know is that the mp40 is the best gun in multiplayer according to the people i've heard talk about it and that gun also has zero recoil whereas the tommy gun or m1 thompson has a lot more recoil and a significantly smaller magazine than the papa shaw so you can sort of see the picture here without even playing the game where gun feels kind of all over the place because the guns don't have that much consistency they either have very little recoil or too much horizontal recoil there really needed to be a gun that had mostly vertical recoil now gun balance isn't really that important for a single player shooter especially in a game where you're generally encouraged to switch weapons especially when there's so many more enemies than there are of your allies so you're likely going to be running out of ammo for your weapons anyway so you're gonna have to grab the inferior japanese weapons and surprisingly even some of the german weapons aren't that good that being said the game is still fun to play i still had a great time running around with the flame thrower which yeah the flamethrower this is probably one of the best flamethrowers in the game unfortunately still considerably nerfed from the real life version the real m2 flamethrower had a range of over 100 feet i can see why they would never do that in a video game much like shotguns are never realistic but to world at war's credit the flame drawer in this game has infinite ammo and just overheats so i think that makes up for it a little bit but i also had fun shooting rifle grenades off the grand or dismembering people with the mg-42 it doesn't matter if it's the most effective tactic or not fun is fun and that's the most important thing now let's talk about the level design in a bit more detail starting with the pacific theater this half of the campaign definitely had more gameplay variety and a big part of this is because treyarch actually directly implemented some of the japanese real world tactics into the gameplay namely scripted ambush encounters snipers who are perched on top of trees some of the soldiers will literally pop out of holes in the ground and rush you with bayonets but on top of these elements you also have to deal with machine gun nests which are given either an air strike or a satchel charge or a flame thrower which is obviously my favorite and it also has probably the best usage i've ever seen of an on-rail shooter level basically you're on this fighter plane and you swap between all these different turret positions and you shoot a bunch of planes and boats so what makes this so special well honestly this is where the immersion factor comes in because whenever you switch turrets you actually see the animation of your character running to the other positions on the plane so already that's pretty cool especially with all these soldiers shouting orders at each other and then parts of your plane get shot full of holes and so that was already cool enough but then about halfway through the level your plane lands in the water and you actually have to start rescuing survivors while also shooting these boats with guns on them and honestly it's more fun to play than to describe but let me just tell you i was pretty impressed by this level because it is very easy to make a dime a dozen unreal shooter level where you just point at things and click but to go to the effort of adding all these little details really made it stand out now for the downsides of the pacific theater namely just one but there's infinitely spawning enemies at several honestly more than several at least a dozen places scattered across these levels i have never been a fan of infinitely spawning enemies and this game likes to abuse it a lot now the way i understand it or at least i'm trying to put myself in the shoes of the developers is that the intent here was to take out a wave of enemies and then push forward take another wave out push forward the problem is it's not always obvious when that's the case or you're just supposed to hold and kill everybody and then your ai partners will move on and so there's many points where you'll just be like crouching shooting waiting for something to happen but then like 10 more guys show up and you repeat ad nauseum but despite this one sizeable problem i still had a pretty good time with this half of the game i think act man put it best in a series where gameplay can be monotonous straightforward and often flat out boring these twists and turns along the way spice things up anytime a mission feels like it's about to get dull it ends so they're all just the right length so what about the eastern front well the level design here is a lot more traditional but the story is far more powerful and memorable namely because of one character in particular reznov who if you've played the black ops games you know exactly who reznov is i don't need to go over this but basically you get to see his backstory though i guess it wasn't a backstory since this game came out before black ops but you get the point and you get to fight for mother russia and beat back the germans and surprisingly this is actually the reason i think this campaign is better is simply because of the story which is rarely the case for me but the pacific theater basically didn't have much of a story at all the characters weren't really memorable i didn't really care about them when they died but the sort of bromance i guess you could call it between dimitri and reznov is pretty much instantly memorable you both narrowly escape the brink of death he teaches you how to snipe which is actually a really good mission sadly the most unique out of that half the campaign anyway and years after surviving the german occupation of stalingrad he saves you once again and you storm berlin and take the reichstag and it's a very simple story like i mentioned earlier it essentially shows that the russians are more than capable of the same kind of cruelty as the nazis maybe not in the ethnic cleansing sort of way but they certainly treated the enemy soldiers as less than human and the game outright shows you this in multiple key moments weirdly enough outside of that sniper level the gameplay isn't much to write home about they're basically just standard linear shooter levels which on the one hand is actually refreshing after the infinite enemy spawns with the japanese but unfortunately some of these missions are weak the tank mission especially kinda sucks and while the final mission is a pretty cool set piece especially if you know the history of this german parliament building and that the final scene is taken straight from a war photograph all of that's cool but the shooting leading up to that isn't really interesting in and of itself well except when you get a hold of the anti-tank rifle then it's fun for a little bit again now for the part some of you have been waiting for veteran difficulty my first playthrough was unhardened and let me tell you hardened was hard enough this was back when hard difficulty in games meant hard as in you would probably die a lot the thing is veteran in this game is basically the equivalent of impossible difficulty from back then and yeah it's [ __ ] hard namely for a few reasons one you die incredibly quickly which is especially annoying in any game with regenerating health because it means constantly hiding behind cover peeking out for a couple seconds maybe killing one or two people and then popping back in cover you better get damn good at throwing grenades and speaking of grenades grenade spam probably the most famous thing this difficulty is known for because yes for whatever reason in this game the higher your difficulty the more often enemies use grenades and they can throw multiple at the same time in the same place so even if you're consistently throwing enemy grenades back you're probably [ __ ] dead if they ever throw two or three at a time and let me just tell you it just sucks sometimes it's not even hard it's just really annoying especially when you're dealing with all the infinite enemy spawns in the pacific theater it just gets ridiculous at a certain point so yeah no it wasn't really fun i didn't even bother finishing it because i don't really care about the bragging rights i certainly could but i just don't think it's worth the effort why make a game less fun for yourself especially if it's a game 13 years old nobody really cares anymore if you beat it on veteran that's all i'm saying but that being said i'd still say overall the campaign was really fun it's short but sweet unfortunately i don't think call of duty's ever gonna have a long but sweet or whatever the equivalent of that idiom would be but i'll take what i can get especially for an old game that's likely cheap and as you know there's still a major element of this game to cover zombies everybody knows about cod zombies and even just the introduction is genius you watch the credits roll and then right at the end you're thrown into this abandoned house and zombies start coming for you tearing down the barricades and with each wave you take down they get stronger and it's actually surprisingly well done and as you already know world at war introduced zombies to call of duty and no doubt if you played a call of duty you've probably played zombies so how does world at war zombies mode compare to later ones well it's a lot more simplistic not that that's a bad thing sometimes simple is better especially when modern games usually steal countless other mechanics and inject unnecessary rpg mechanics into their games in the case of later call of duties they expanded the zombies mode by adding quests and loot boxes and basically [ __ ] that just over complicated it and reduced the skill ceiling by adding these progression elements not to mention adding all these over-the-top characters making the maps twice as large there was even a zombies mode that was essentially like a linear level that you had to progress through i don't even remember which game that was maybe black ops 3 and eventually the original vision was lost probably because they ran out of ideas to actually make zombies interesting but in the original it was very simple the default map knock darren toten listen [ __ ] all of you who are gonna get on me about my german pronunciation i didn't take german i wasn't one of those goddamn hipsters it took german instead of spanish no i took french like a truly enlightened lad anyway knock darren toten is a very simple map it's a dilapidated building with two floors initially you're locked to one half of the first floor there's a handful of wooden barricades in the windows and zombies come for you and try and tear down the barricades obviously you kill them you get points for killing them and you spend points to buy guns on the walls or to clear debris and unlock other parts of the house and that's literally it there's nothing else to it just save up points and buy the best guns don't trap yourself which is actually kind of difficult this is a pretty small map try and rebuild the barricades in the early rounds in the later rounds doesn't really matter to be honest use your grenades to create crawlers and leave a crawler alive to rebuild the barricades and also spend your points in peace these tactics are still viable on the other three dlc maps obviously but each one adds a lot more mechanics and is significantly larger than this one in the steam version the dlc comes with it thankfully and while the asylum and the swamp were kind of cool derrice is definitely the best one this massive experimental facility or whatever it is nazi science [ __ ] is definitely one of the most iconic maps in the series i think everybody likes it it's huge you can spend points everywhere there's so many pathways to duke around the zombies it's also the map to introduce pack a punch which gives you the ability to permanently upgrade your gun unfortunately i died right after getting my upgraded tommy gun here so i didn't really get to show it off and of course then you have the other upgrades that are in the other two dlc maps like juggernog which lets you take more hits speed cola which lets you reload much faster etc etc the zombies experience is still fairly fun but i wouldn't recommend playing it by yourself i played this by myself and while there's a certain challenge element to see how far you can get by yourself all in all this is obviously a co-op mode it's just sad to play it by yourself and yeah with friends this is one of the few times where a co-op experience appropriately elevates the mode whereas most games in the past five years just throw in co-op and expect the game to get praised for it even though it's not built around co-op at all no this is a classic horde mode a good horde mode and it's fun but if you are gonna play it again preferably do it on console and split screen or set up a lan party for that classic experience so in conclusion is world that war really the last good world war two game yeah honestly it is cod world war ii was well i'm not going to call it a disappointment because you probably shouldn't have had expectations for it but it sucked i can say that it basically neutered world war ii and i highly expect cod vanguard to use the excuse of fantasy world war 2.5 to further censor nazi imagery and to avoid showing the actual horrors of war i'm not going to get into a political rant at the end of this video i'll save it for the next one when i can see how bad the campaign is for myself but obviously they've already played their hand with the wokeness it's very obvious even from just these trailers cod world at war honored the sacrifice of these men by attempting to portray a more serious tone of world war ii i wouldn't say it was all that successful mainly the writing needed some work the graphics and presentation aren't exactly up to par for these days at the time it looked pretty realistic but it's hard to take some of these more serious scenes seriously when they look a little cartoonish if you know what i mean but it tried it used real war footage there's not a chance in hell cod vanguard shows concentration camps or emaciated starving freezing to death russians or the true evil that some men are capable of no it's going to be cartoonish [ __ ] meant to be enjoyed by your average redditor so world at war is a great game but cod sucks now so vanguard will probably suck should you play world at war in 2021 yeah you could go through the campaign maybe grab some buddies and play some zombies you can get the game pretty cheap maybe not as cheap as it should be on steam but if you can track down a physical copy yeah it'll be dirt cheap i would definitely recommend the game and i'm just going to say in advance don't buy vanguard hey guys thanks for watching do the things the algorithm likes if you haven't already check out my patreon if you want to support me directly and thank you to my patrons i truly appreciate your donations so i can afford to buy these shitty aaa games that i review for views because i have no integrity left apparently but maybe it'll be fun to [ __ ] on vanguard at least that's what i'm hoping and yes of course that's going to be the next video that's the reason i made this video well after that i'm probably going to check out gta trilogy so that might be more your speed and hopefully after that i'll actually have top 10 overrated games done if i can ever find time to work on it and yeah that's about it i'll see you next time guys

Channel: Synthetic Man

Views: 321,739

Keywords:

Id: WFHDG3QbCT4

Length: 26min 18sec (1578 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021