Over time, though, those changes have been getting more and more divisive, culminating in last year's game, which let you travel to space, run on walls, and shoot lasers at the opposition. The game's fast action and propulsive sense of progression with interesting new gear and unlocks changed it all, and in the years that followed, developers continued to refine and rework the Call of Duty blueprint, often in surprising new ways that made a great thing even better. It's been a decade, almost to the day, since Call of Duty rewrote the book on multiplayer first-person shooters with the release of Modern Warfare. It holds up.Despite the change in era, this still feels like a Call of Duty game.

This is what Call of Duty is now-a joyless slog through cutscenes you don’t care about to get more of a game that isn’t good. There’s no chaos, danger, or fun in Call of Duty: World War II. The video game was basically saying: 'You'd be so screwed if this wasn't a video game.' It made me think about how-if I couldn't reload an earlier save-I couldn't survive on that beach for even a minute.

I died on that beach as soon as the door to the boat opened, while diving for cover, and while crawling in the water, because that's how people died there. This is not a thing that big budget video games do often, and it was a great instance in which game design kinda sorta managed to serve a history lesson. That original Normandy level was striking, and recreated in so many games since because it dropped players on the beach and told them to figure it out or die. It wants to cash in on the nostalgia of Allied Assault’s Normandy level without doing anything of the things that made said level interesting. This is the first year where I felt as if the game was completely wasting my time. Call of Duty games has been in decline for years now, but they’ve always been serviceable, dumb fun.

World war ii call of duty