Call of Duty: WW2 (

2017

)

By 2017, the Call of Duty franchise was officially out of ideas. They had beaten the modern military shooter horse so completely to death with a series of annual installments. An attempt to steer the franchise into sci-fi territory with Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare [2014], Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare [2016] and the later entries in the Black Ops sub-series had mostly generated derision and disappointment. Despite still selling well, the series had become a joke and was in danger of losing its mastery over the market in the face of more impressive shooters like Doom [2016] and Wolfenstein: The New Order [2014]. It seems like a decision born from desperation, rather than inspiration that returned the Call of Duty franchise to the World War 2 setting that initially launched the series. It had been nearly a full decade since the superlative Call of Duty: World at War [2008], and an updated World War 2 game with spiffy modern graphics seemed like just the thing to set the franchise back on the right course. Maybe this sudden reversal would silence the naysayers who had been mocking the game since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 [2011]. Of course, this was not to be, Call of Duty: WW2 was a disappointment, just another mediocre entry into the later day Call of Duty series. More's the pity, because in the single-player campaign at least (the multiplayer is totally FUBAR) there was a seed of something great that could have been worked into a masterpiece, but instead withers on the vine.

The story and characters are unusually rich for a Call of Duty game. You take on the role of Private Red Daniels, a Texan farm-boy who was drafted into the infantry and was sent, along with the rest of the Big Red One, to storm the beaches at Normandy and invade Nazi-occupied France. Right off the bat Call of Duty: WW2 differentiates itself from other entries in the series by creating a bit of internal tension within the main character's squadron. The squad is headed up by Lieutenant Turner, a blandly heroic good guy who would do whatever it takes to safeguard his men and serve his country. His number two, Sergeant Pierson, is a real mean son-of-a-bitch that fundamentally disagrees with his commander about how the war is to be conducted and how the men under his command are to be treated. Pierson is not a one-dimensional hard-ass though, as the campaign unfolds we start to realize that he is motivated not by malice or cruelty but by a preventable disaster that got most of his men killed in North Africa. He urges Turner to stick to the mission when the squad discovers a group of German civilians not because he is indifferent to their suffering, but because he knows firsthand the dangers of letting emotions distract you from your objectives. He pushes the men under his command away from him not because he is a bastard, but because he's afraid to accept them as brothers-in-arms less he suffer the pain of losing them in combat. He drinks, not because he is irresponsible, but because he is desperate to numb himself to the burdens of his command. He's not a hero by any stretch of the imagination, but he is a believable depiction of a normal man operating under unimaginable stresses. That so much care is spent crafting a character who, in other games in the series, would just be a walking stereotype that occasionally dispenses orders, is an achievement in-and-of-itself. The rest of the supporting cast are less impressive, but there are multiple times throughout the brief campaign where I was able to lose myself in the setting and characters. Their interactions together feel natural and relaxed. Occasionally the dialogue borders on anachronistic (“You can do this” Turner says to Daniels during the opening mission, this is the sort of language that modern college students might use, not soldiers in the 1940s), but for the most part, it is believable and even compelling.

The game bungles only one character of any real significance, that of private Howard a black radio operator who joins your unit around the time of the Battle of the Bulge. Howard's presence here is not completely unbelievable. Sure, initially blacks and whites were placed in segregated units, but I'm more than willing to accept that after months of fighting there would be more than a few open-minded commanders who would be willing to accept veteran reinforcements of any race rather than fill their units with green replacements. Naturally, not everyone in the battalion would be so accepting of their new comrade, this being the 1940s after all. There is potentially a compelling story here about men learning to overcome their differences and accept each other on their own terms. A story that, perversely enough, Western entertainment was far better at telling in the 1980s than they are today (pretty much every interracial buddy-cop movie gives you an effective model). Unfortunately, we're not given this story or even a failed attempt at telling this story. Instead, Call of Duty: WW2 only gives us the set-up for this whole plot-line and then the pay-off without putting in any of the work to make us give a shit about these characters. It's a shame given how deftly the campaign handled the conflict with Sergeant Pierson and his men. The writers were certainly up to the task of giving us a story worth telling about Howard, but I suspect that the more timely political factors made them gun shy here, as nuanced stories about race and discrimination are often unfairly branded as racist themselves.

The game's campaign is brought to life with beautifully detailed graphics, and some of the best facial motion capture I've ever seen. This might be the first game I've played that one-ups LA Noire [2011] in that department. The immersion is hindered somewhat by the jump in quality from the cinematic to the gameplay, and consequently, the first few minutes of each level feels like something is a bit off. There's also a huge gap in the facial animations between the main characters and the side figures, usually, it's not noticeable, but every now and then you'll look a minor NPC square in the face and be struck by how fake he looks compared to the main characters. The game keeps the series' tradition of washed-out and muted colors, but to its credit it never devolves into an endless brown streak.

The moment-to-moment warfare in Call of Duty: WW2 is as fun and accessible as it has always been. It's an on-rails shooter, which is always somewhat frustrating., but at this point, I've given up hope that Call of Duty would ever return to the more open-ended maps of its early period. Someone at Activision must have been listening to every complaint I've made since 2004 because there they have removed regenerating health and more shockingly still added in a visible health bar (remember those!). They don't even smear jam over the entire screen when you get wounded! This alone is enough to make me favorably disposed to the whole campaign. Moving from cover and blasting enemies is as natural as ever, the only problem is that the game seems hell-bent on interrupting you at every possible moment. Either it's a semi-mandatory stealth section where you wind up getting spotted immediately and going back to the usual guns blazing approach, or a tedious vehicle section that feels clunky next to the much more fluid and polished infantry game-play, or worst of all a QTE. Call of Duty: WW2 seems to have listened to complaints that QTEs in previous entries were not sufficiently interactive, because now you have to drag your mouse across the screen to a selected point and in order to even trigger the button prompt. This doesn't make the QTEs any more enjoyable though, it just makes a tedious, annoying task all the more tedious and annoying. Seriously Call of Duty, you have an effective (albeit simple) gameplay loop, just let me enjoy that for the 6-7 hours that it takes to complete your campaign. If you must have a vehicle section or a stealth section than build the whole level around that and let me sink my teeth into it, rather than just distracting me from what I'm already invested in for five minutes here or five minutes there.

In one case, the game does follow my advice, during the Liberation mission about halfway through the campaign. This mission tasks the player with taking on the role of the French resistance fighter, Rousseau as she infiltrates the headquarters of the Gestapo in Paris and plants bombs. Your first objective is to make contact with the resistance's man on the inside, but you have no idea what he looks like other than his rank and what he'll be wearing (a grey officer's uniform). So you wander around the complex for a while, trying the passphrase on any Oberst who fits the general description, and sneaking past guards in any area where you're not supposed to be, and maybe rescuing a few captured resistance fighters if you're feeling especially generous. Occasionally you'll be stopped by guards and questioned about your orders, to which you will have to answer with information you memorized from your forged documents. The level does not feel at all like a Call of Duty game, but since there is enough room to breathe, get used to the new mechanics, and understand the nature of your mission, it winds up working spectacularly well. Especially when compared to the sudden shifts to tank and airplane combat that often leave the player flailing about helplessly for the first couple moments (when I switched to piloting a fighter for the first time I crashed almost immediately).

I'll confess, I did not take a very in-depth look at the multiplayer, as competitive shooters are not really my thing but the evidence on the ground suggests that the Call of Duty: WW2 multiplayer is more a means of selling you loot boxes than an actual game mode. At least the game limits its micro-transactions to cosmetic items like grip skins and emotes rather than going full pay-to-win. The insulting part is the fact that the game is so lazy with them, recycling the same emotes and skins and giving the player an absurd number of duplicates. I find myself in disbelief that this model could sucker in any whales, but then I can't even understand paying full price for a new game let alone adding on hundreds of dollars to the price tag in microtransactions.

In terms of unflinching depiction of the horrors of war, this is a far tamer game than Call of Duty: World at War [2008], or even the original Call of Duty [2003]. In Call of Duty [2003], you were ordered to attack German positions as a Soviet soldier, without a weapon. If you turned and ran, or even refused to advance with sufficient aggressiveness, then your commissars would not hesitate to shoot you. It's grim, brutal and completely historically accurate, just the way I like my World War 2 shooters. Call of Duty: World at War [2008] went one better, showing the nearly post-apocalyptic side of the Eastern front, including having your player character massacre surrendering Germans. It was horrible, brutish, and cruel. Again, just like real life. That Call of Duty: WW2 fails to live up to the previous entries in the series in terms of gritty realism should come as no surprise. This is a game from $_CURRENT_YEAR + 2 after all, where every big-budget release has to thread the needle between traumatizing its players with unnecessary depictions of the horrors of war and white-washing history by leaving out all the gory details. The zeitgeist is simply too sensitive for a title as big as Call of Duty to take any risks whatsoever in this department. Even the trip to the concentration camp (it's a small one for Jewish POWs taken on the Western front) in the final mission comes across as safe and sanitized, if only because the place is already abandoned by the time your squad gets there. There are a few corpses here and there, but nothing even approaching the ghastly reality of camps like this. That I can play through this segment without feeling my skin crawl if proof enough that it fails to capture the realities of the situation. World War 2 (counting all the various war crimes and crimes against humanity that were committed during this period) was the single greatest obscenity that mankind has ever inflicted on itself. Not every piece of media about the conflict need reflect this fact, there is room for both Schindler's List (1993) and The Dirty Dozen (1967) (Hell, I'll even concede that there's space for The Inglorious Bastards (1978) and Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS (1975) too). However, it's important that whatever the vision the creators have for their work, that they follow it to its logical conclusion. Call of Duty: WW2 doesn't do that and winds up trying to bring up the horrors of the conflict while simultaneously sparring the viewer from their full extent. If you want to make a fun action-adventure story set in WW2 that's fine if you want to explore the limits of human beings in extreme circumstances that's fine too, but for god's sake show some backbone and commit to one or the other.

Tellingly, even this mild depiction of World War 2 here managed to draw criticism from the professional victims in the video game media. Before the game was even released, Tyler Wilde from PC (Politically Correct?) Gamer criticized the game sight-unseen for trying to sell itself as an anti-war game. The article argues that the game's anti-war message “is at odds even with the first in-game footage, which mainly glorifies, or at least maintains the idea that WWII was a brutal but noble conflict.” I don't think there's anyone with any real understanding of the conflict that would argue that WWII was anything other than a “brutal but noble conflict.” I am the sort of pedant that points out that every side committed atrocities to a certain extent: The Anglo-Americans had indiscriminate heavy bombing that targeting civilians, the Soviets raped millions of German women, the Japanese killed noncombatants (children and babies among them), and the Germans systematically executed millions of Jews, gypsies, and other people deemed socially undesirable. Yet even while acknowledging the atrocities committed by the allied forces, I will readily concede that WWII, more than almost any other war in history, was a conflict with clear moral dimensions. Even if the allies were not necessarily the good guys that we like to depict ourselves as in movies and video games, the axis powers certainly were the bad guys and they needed to be stopped. One has to wonder what Tyler Wilde thinks the allies should have done when faced with the world as it existed in 1941, simply allowed the Axis powers to rape and pillage to their heart's content?

As if to illustrate the no-win nature of modern outrage-driven criticism, once the game was released it came under fire for daring to depict World War 2 with a slight degree of nuance. In one scene early in the campaign, a column of American tanks rolls past a group of Germans dead who have been incinerated by firebombs. One of the soldiers jokes: “I'm guessing no to the open casket.” to which his squad-mate replies “Hey, that's somebody's son.” It's a small moment, but one that acknowledges despite the grime necessities of war, that there are human beings on each side of the conflict. One can question the writing or characters, this is after a video game series that has become synonymous with idiotic entertainment, but the basic sentiment should be beyond reproach. Despite being unquestionably true, this exchange stuck in the throats of the chattering classes. In his article comparing the game to Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus [2017], Alex Kubas-Meyer mocks this sequence, saying “What a pull quote: 'Nazis. They’re not all bad' -Call of Duty: WWII.” This, of course, is not the message the game relates in the cut-scene. The American soldiers are not saying that some Nazis are good, they are saying that some Germans are good. It's hardly ambiguous because they cite such figures as Beethoven, who died long before there was such a thing as a Nazi, as examples of one of the good ones. I'm not sure if this is a deliberate misinterpretation on the part of Kubas-Meyer, or if he is just completely ignorant of the conflict and thinks that all Germans at the time were Nazis and equally guilty for the crimes of their leadership. Either way, he's not somebody that anyone should be looking to for either critical analysis or political op-eds.

If the game is just a fun action-adventure it falls under attack for white-washing history and depicting WWII as a grim but necessary conflict (never mind that it was just that). If the game attempts a degree of nuance, showing the war and all the associated shades of gray, then it falls under fire for treating the Nazis as human beings, even though the game constantly acknowledges their crimes. The only winning move here is to not play this idiotic game. These sorts of critics cannot be appeased, because they are not looking for a work of art that they can take on their own merits. They are looking for a reason to call something offensive, and they will always find it no matter what the game is like. Call of Duty: WW2 is the safest, most sanitized depiction of the conflict in the history of the series and it still attracted criticism like a lightning rod. There's no point in trying to appease these people. Pussy-footing around will only make your game blander and less interesting to people who might actually enjoy it.