Call of Duty: WWII (2017, Playstation 4) Review

WORLD WAR II NEVER CHANGES

Also for: Windows, Xbox One

[Please note that I'm reviewing this game's single-player campaign only. I'm no fan of online multiplayer and have played very little of it, so my opinion wouldn't be worth a damn anyway.]

After staying away from the Call of Duty franchise since Call of Duty 2 (2005) on PC, I return to World War II fifteen years later—only to find the same cinematic celebration of killing Nazis. Call of Duty: WWII is bombastic, ridiculous, and spectacular in the way a Michael Bay movie is. It’s the kind of game where your squadmate can soak up bullets like rain for an entire mission, only to be crippled by a scripted bayonet wound moments later, forcing you to drag him to safety.

Call of Duty: WWII numbs the mind, assaults the senses, and rarely convinces me that it depicts war realistically—though it fakes realism with impressive confidence. The characters bark dumb military jargon, yearn for the war to end, and yet seem perversely thrilled to be model soldiers. I couldn’t care less. I have an easier time accepting death-defying set pieces, like a chase where you drive a jeep alongside a train, trying to derail it while dodging machine-gun fire from its wagons. Peter Jackson would be proud.

The core running-and-gunning works well, supported by generous aim assist and clear, punchy sound design. The game leans hard into wartime camaraderie. Your squad constantly shouts orders, warnings, and encouragement, and you can respond by requesting ammo, health kits, grenades, or enemy scouting. Helping allies earns gratitude and reinforces the illusion of teamwork. None of this is new, but it’s competently executed, and for brief moments you do feel like part of something larger.

Clarity is the game’s most impressive achievement, and a testament to strong level design. Amid constant explosions and deafening gunfire, I always know what I’m supposed to do. When I fail, it’s usually my own fault for not reading the environment carefully enough. Crumbling cities, open fields, and foreign village streets are easy to navigate, and weapon placement subtly telegraphs what’s coming next. Finding a sniper rifle is a relief—I know I’ll be picking Nazis off from a safe distance. Finding a bazooka, on the other hand, makes me panic.

The illusion breaks during one-off sequences like stealth, infiltration, and vehicle combat. These sections introduce unfamiliar controls that never feel as refined, and occasionally even shift perspective to a new character. The stealth segments in particular are punishing and add little, despite infiltration being a staple of World War II fiction. Fortunately, developer Sledgehammer Games seems well aware that man-to-man combat is where Call of Duty shines, and these detours are mercifully brief.

What’s most striking is how similar this feels to the Call of Duty I remember from decades ago: cutscene, firefight, cutscene, firefight, in a rigidly linear chain until the credits roll. The chaos and intensity are real, but so is the constant intrusion of scripted storytelling that interrupts the flow. Just as you find your rhythm, the game stops you to rearrange the conditions. It’s easy to see why many players prefer the freer, systemic design of multiplayer.

The campaign’s eleven missions (twelve if you count the epilogue) take you from the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, to the liberation of concentration camps in the spring of 1945. Unsurprisingly, these are the moments that linger most. The Normandy landing is punishing, forcing you to learn the controls under fire. Realistically, you shouldn’t survive even the opening moments—but total realism in a war game would be unbearable. You’d spend hours marching or hiding, only to die in an ambush.

If the mechanics feel old-fashioned, at least the presentation is impeccable. You barely have time to appreciate the detailed environments—sunlit French villages, snow-covered Ardennes forests—before motion blur turns them into fleeting impressions. Still, they establish a strong sense of place that’s difficult to convey through screenshots alone.

You follow the same platoon throughout, with occasional side missions offering different gameplay flavors. The high-quality character models make it instantly obvious that Josh Duhamel plays Sergeant Pierson, the abrasive, antagonistic counterpoint to Lieutenant Turner, portrayed by Jeffrey Pierce. Their good-versus-evil dynamic, clearly inspired by Platoon, hints at a broader commentary on war—but the game disappointingly backs away from saying anything meaningful before the finale.

You play as Private Daniels (Brett Zimmerman), a pawn in this power struggle and a man haunted by his failure to live up to his older brother. The writers aim for a personal redemption arc, but I never buy into it. Withholding key details until the end only weakens the impact, and when the emotional payoff relies on tired clichés like “You ain’t got nothing to prove” or “Glad you got my back,” it rings hollow.

World War II is humanity’s great tragedy, yet fiction has turned it into triumphant spectacle countless times. In this latest attempt, the words feel so worn they barely register, no matter how convincing the performances. At its best, however, Call of Duty: WWII discards dialogue altogether and becomes genuinely unsettling. Crawling unarmed through a dark basement in search of a doomed French girl, while enemies swarm the building above, the horror feels real.

The campaign doesn’t sustain that quality for all six to eight hours, but despite its unevenness, it ends up moderately enjoyable. When it embraces its core strength—direct, man-versus-man combat—I’m willing to keep playing. The moment it tries to be anything else, I’m out.