War, as Fallout 3 so famously puts it, never changes. While the weapons and tactics may differ, it's still about chaos and fear and the overwhelming of the senses as adrenaline surges through your veins. That's a hard experience to capture on a screen, but the Call of Duty series comes close thanks to its constant redefinition of what "11" is in terms of intensity for first-person shooters. Last year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare delivered an awesome and varied single-player experience that was matched with an even better multiplayer suite, and it made for some really big shoes for Call of Duty: World at War to fill.

If you've been living in Antarctica the past year and haven't heard, then yes, World at War returns back to the series' World War II roots. This has caused no end of grumbling from fans of Modern Warfare's contemporary setting, as well as the fact that this installment was done by Treyarch, a sister-studio to Call of Duty-creator Infinity Ward. Treyarch did the somewhat-maligned Call of Duty 3, but the studio looks to atone for that by delivering a game with an impressive amount of content. There's a solid single-player campaign, co-op play, a huge multiplayer suite, and even a fun, silly mode featuring zombies.


It certainly helps that World at War focuses on the less popularized theaters of World War II. Instead of serving up Normandy and D-Day for what would have been the umpteenth time for World War II shooters, the game covers the island hopping campaign in the Pacific as well as the Red Army's reversal of the tide at Stalingrad all the way to the Fall of Berlin. This provides some interesting new battlefields set on sun-bleached coral atolls in the Pacific. You will see some more familiar spots with the bombed-out cities and farmlands ofthe Eastern Front missions, but it's still well done.

War tends to be a savage affair, but the Pacific and the Eastern Front were especially so. In the game, Japanese soldiers swarm out of the brush, erupting out of spider holes to charge straight at you in an attempt to run you through with their bayonets. They'll play dead and wait for you to walk into the middle of a trap. Though set outdoors, it feels like close-quarters combat much of the time. Meanwhile, the Russian Front is full of merciless moments; there's plenty of gunning down of wounded and unarmed soldiers by both sides, and sometimes you're asked to pull the trigger yourself.



This remains a Call of Duty game through and through. What that means is that the action is fast and fluid, as well as rigidly scripted. The success of the franchise proves that there's a vast audience for that, and this won't change anyone's mind. Enemy soldiers and your computer-controlled teammates respawn endlessly until you advance far enough to hit the triggers to make them stop reappearing. Then you advance to the next firefight and repeat the process over again. The thing is, you're far too busy shooting and ducking and dying to really notice much of the time. The sense of immersion is pretty complete.

There are plenty of deafening, large-scale set-piece battles, but there's also variation to change things up. Case in point is the PBY mission, where you man the guns on a Navy aircraft. At first glance, this seems to be a mirror to the Spectre Gunship mission in Modern Warfare; in both missions you rain fire down from above. But the Spectre Gunship mission has a cold detachment to it; those tiny blips on the screen that are human beings die from a foe that they cannot see and fight back against. In World at War's PBY mission, you're in the midst of a raging air and sea battle, taking damage and fighting for your life. Or there's a sniper mission to whack a German general that doesn't quite have the cat-and-mouse feeling of Modern Warfare's sniper level.


The campaign does suffer a bit due to its broad scope; the narrative skips over months at a time, showcasing the major battles of the war. The result is that the sense of story doesn't seem as strong as it did in Modern Warfare. It probably doesn't help that we all know how the war eventually turned out; Modern Warfare had the advantage of a fictionalized story with plenty of shocking twists and turns.

All told, the single-player campaign is about as short as that in Modern Warfare, but it doesn't drag on. Plus, there's considerably more replayability here because the bulk of the campaign is playable in cooperative mode with up to three other players. I say the bulk because a handful of missions are missing, notably the sniper mission and the PBY mission; the former wouldn't make sense with four snipers, while the latter doesn't have enough room in the narrow PBY for more than one player to scamper about. Not only is the campaign in co-op, but there's also a Death Card system reminiscent of Halo 3's skull system. Scattered throughout the campaign are death cards that you can find. Each one unlocks a different capability, like Sticks & Stones, which only gives you a knife and dud grenades. Sure, it might seem strange, but it lets you have fun if you want to challenge yourself.

Multiplayer is definitely an area where World at War shines. Modern Warfare had arguably one of the greatest multiplayer suites in recent history, and World at War builds on it. There remains the create-a-class and rank system that lets you unlock perks, weapons, and upgrades that you can then mix-and-match to create different load outs. Many of Modern Warfare's perks are here, adjusted for the earlier age. For instance, what used to be the UAV Jammer is now Camouflage to keep you from being spotted by any spotting planes the enemy calls in.

There are also about a dozen new perks, about half of which are associated with vehicles for the four huge vehicle-enabled maps. And while tanks can deal out a lot of punishment, they're also very vulnerable to infantry antitank weapons and other tanks. Driving around in a tank is cool, but you'll realize just how slow World War II-era tanks are. Just like in real-life, you need to coordinate infantry and armor together for maximum effectiveness, and it's nice that the PC version has built-in voice chat. Fans of Modern Warfare on the PC had to set up third-party voice systems out of game to talk to one another.

The reward mechanic in World at War is also similar, but it does have a nice twist. Three kills in a row gets you a spotting plane rather than a UAV, five kills gives you an artillery strike instead of an air strike, and seven kills without dying lets you call in my favorite new feature: dogs. Yes, you unleash the hounds of war, a pack of killer dogs that will make a beeline to the enemy (helpful in spotting where they're hiding) as well as tear their throats out if they can. The dogs are difficult to take down, because they'll swarm you, and if you're busy shooting at the dogs you're often not paying attention to the fact that an opponent is lining you up in his sights.


All the popular modes from Modern Warfare return, like Headquarters (each team battles to seize a point on the map; the team that does doesn't gets to respawn if they die), search and destroy, team deathmatch and the like. There are also two new modes, war and capture-the-flag. The former is similar to Battlefield's conquest mode; there are five points on the map that must be seized. The kicker is that only one point is under contention at a time, so it focuses the action. (And, yes, Call of Duty 3 fans will recognize that it had war mode as well.)

And then there's the icing on the cake, a silly-yet-fun bonus co-op mode called Nacht der Untoten, or Night of the Undead. It's also referred to as Nazi Zombies, and it's a last stand against waves of oncoming zombies. You and up to three others are holed up inside a bunker; the zombies try to break down the barricades at the doors and windows and you have to kill them. Each wave becomes harder by throwing more zombies at you or making the zombies faster or both. You gain points for killing the zombies and for rebuilding the barricades, and these points can be used to purchase weapons, ammo, and access to other parts of the bunker. There's even a mystery box that can serve up a ray gun straight out of 1940s pulp fiction. Still, eventually the zombies will kill you, and the goal is to survive as long as possible to compare your performance on the leaderboard.

Given that it uses the Modern Warfare engine, World at War looks every bit as good on both the PC and the Xbox 360. I've always been impressed with the level of detail on everything; walk up to a fellow soldier and you can see the seams in their clothing. The most memorable visual in the game for me has to be the arterial blood spray that happens when a human body gets torn apart by explosions and gunfire. The dark red of the blood is in stark contrast to the dust and smoke in the air. And the frame rate is Call of Duty-smooth on both platforms from that I saw. (For comparison purposes, the PC I used had a Core 2 Quad processor with an 8800GTX and 2GB of RAM. All detail settings were set to maximum at 1920x1200 resolution.)

Activision tapped Hollywood's top talent for the voice acting. Kiefer Sutherland does his part for the Marines, while Gary Oldman is the main voice for the Russians. Sutherland's voice is so distinct that it's easy to imagine him in the recording booth, bellowing his lines into the microphone (that must have been some recording session). Oldman, who has made a career out of being an utter chameleon, is almost unrecognizable in his role, and he delivers a convincing Russian accent. The rest of the sound effects are as authentic as we've come to expect; when you hear the metallic thunk of various machine guns you know that the sound guys spent a lot of time shooting and recording those World War II guns in a desert somewhere. Yet it's the mixing of all these elements that makes a Call of Duty game; there's so much audio erupting all over the place, from gunfire, explosions, guys yelling out commands or warnings, the whistle of artillery above, to the rumbling of vehicles nearby. It all combines to create a rich soundscape comparable to those in movies.

Password	Effect
give all	All weapons
sf_use_bw 1	Black and White movie mode
devmap [map name]	Change maps
notarget	Disable AI
god	God mode
sf_use_ignoreammo 1	Infinite ammo
mapname	List maps
noclip	No clipping mode
sf_use_invert 1	Photo negative mode
sf_use_chaplin 1	Silent movie mode

Cheats for RUSSIA vs. GERMANY levels

Go into the options menu and enable the game console, then (in menu or gameplay, it doesn't matter) press the ~ key to open it. Type the password for each level to play it on cheat mode.

Password	Effect
Devmap see2	Play the mission Blood and Iron (VEHICLE LEVEL)
Devmap ber3b	Play the mission Downfall (FINAL USSR LVL)
Devmap ber2	Play the mission Eviction
Devmap ber3a	Play the mission Heart of the Reich
Devmap ber1	Play the mission Ring of Steel
Devmap see1	Play the mission Their Land, Their Blood
Devmap sniper	Play the mission Vendetta
Devmap nazi_zombie_prototype	Play the Nazi Zombie game extension

Cheats for USA vs. JAPAN levels

Go into the options menu and enable the game console, then (in menu or gameplay, it doesn't matter) press the ~ key to open it. Type the password for each level to play it on cheat mode.

Password	Effect
devmap pby_fly	Play the mission Black Cats (VEHICLE LEVEL)
devmap oki2	Play the mission Blowtorch & Corkscrew
devmap oki3	Play the mission Breaking Point (FINAL USA LVL)
devmap pel1a	Play the mission Burn Em' Out
devmap pel2	Play the mission Hard Landing
Devmap pel1	Play the mission Little Resistance
devmap pel1b	Play the mission Relentless
Devmap mak	Play the mission Semper Fi

Level select codes

First unlock the game's console by going to Game Options and select "Yes" for the Game Console. Next open it up with the ~ key. Then, type in these codes to go to the level.

Password	Effect
Devmap pby_fly	Play the mission Black Cats
Devmap see2	Play the mission Blood and Iron
Devmap oki2	Play the mission Blowtorch & Corkscrew
Devmap oki3	Play the mission Breaking Point
Devmap pel1a	Play the mission Burn 'Em Out
Devmap ber3b	Play the mission Downfall
Devmap ber2	Play the mission Eviction
Devmap pel2	Play the mission Hard Landing
Devmap ber3a	Play the mission Heart of the Reich
Devmap pel1	Play the mission Little Resistance
Devmap nazi_zombie_prototype	Play the mission Nacht der Untoten
Devmap pel1b	Play the mission Relentless
Devmap ber1	Play the mission Ring Of Steel
Devmap mak	Play the mission Semper Fi
Devmap see1	Play the mission Their Land, Their Blood
Devmap sniper	Play the mission Vendetta

Modes

Complete certain objectives to unlock different game modes.

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Veteran mode	Reach Level 32 to unlock Veteran mode, which is a Co-op mode with much tougher enemies.
Zombie mode	Successfully complete Campaign mode to unlock Zombie mode, which is a four-player Co-op mode against endless waves of Nazi zombies.

Online Multiplayer Challenges

Complete the following challenges online to unlock the following:

Unlockable	How to Unlock
Aperture Sight for Gewehr 43	Get 75 kills with the Gewehr 43
Aperture Sight for M1A1 Carbine	Get 75 kills with the M1A1 Carbine
Aperture Sight for MP40	Get 75 kills with the MP40
Aperture Sight for PPSh-41	Get 25 kills with the PPSh-41
Aperture Sight for STG-44	Get 75 kills with the STG-44
Aperture Sight for SVT-40	Get 75 kills with the SVT-40
Aperture Sight for Thompson	Get 75 kills with the Thompson
Aperture Sight for Type 100	Get 25 kills with the Type 100
Bayonet for Arisaka	Get 75 kills with the Arisaka
Bayonet for Kar98K	Get 75 kills with the Kar98K
Bayonet for M1 Garand	Get 75 kills with the M1 Garand
Bayonet for M1897 Trench Gun	Get 75 kills with the M1897 Trench Gun
Bayonet for M1A1 Carbine	Get 100 kills with the M1A1 Carbine
Bayonet for Mosin-Nagant	Get 75 kills with the Mosin-Nagant
Bayonet for Springfield	Get 25 kills with the Springfield
Bayonet for Type 99	Get 75 kills with the Type 99
Bipod for BAR	Get 25 kills with the BAR
Bipod for Browning M1919	Get 25 kills with the Browning M1919
Bipod for DP-28	Get 25 kills with the DP-28
Bipod for FG42	Get 25 kills with the FG42
Bipod for MG42	Get 25 kills with the MG42
Bipod for Type 99	Get 25 kills with the Type 99
Box Magazine for M1A1 Carbine	Get 150 kills with the M1A1 Carbine
Dual Magazines for MP40	Get 150 kills with the MP40
Extended Clip for Type 100	Get 25 kills with the Type 100
Flash Hider for M1 Garand	Get 25 kills with the M1 Garand
Flash Hider for M1A1 Carbine	Get 25 kills with the M1A1 Carbine
Flash Hider for STG-44	Get 25 kills with the STG-44
Flash Hider for SVT-40	Get 25 kills with the SVT-40
Grip for Double Barreled Shotgun	Get 25 kills with the Double Barreled Shotgun
Grip for M1897 Trench Gun	Get 25 kills with the M1897 Trench Gun
Rifle Grenade for Arisaka	Get 150 kills with the Arisaka
Rifle Grenade for Gewehr 43	Get 150 kills with the Gewehr 43
Rifle Grenade for Kar98K	Get 150 kills with the Kar98K
Rifle Grenade for M1 Garand	Get 100 kills with the M1 Garand
Rifle Grenade for Mosin-Nagant	Get 150 kills with the Mosin-Nagant
Rifle Grenade for Springfield	Get 75 kills with the Springfield
Round Drum for PPSh-41	Get 75 kills with the PPSh-41
Round Drum for Thompson	Get 150 kills with the Thompson
Sawed-Off Shotgun	Get 75 kills with the Double Barreled Shotgun
Sniper Scope for Arisaka	Get 25 kills with the Arisaka
Sniper Scope for Kar98K	Get 25 kills with the Kar98K
Sniper Scope for M1 Garand	Get 150 kills with the M1 Garand
Sniper Scope for Mosin-Nagant	Get 25 kills with the Mosin-Nagant
Suppressor for Gewehr 43	Get 25 kills with the Gewehr 43
Suppressor for MP40	Get 25 kills with the MP40
Suppressor for Thompson	Get 25 kills with the Thompson
Suppressor for Type 100	Get 25 kills with the Type 100
Telescopic Sight for FG42	Get 75 kills with the FG42
Telescopic Sight for STG-44	Get 100 kills with the STG-44
Telescopic Sight for SVT-40	Get 150 kills with the SVT-40
Telesopic Sight for Gewehr 43	Get 100 kills with the Gewehr 43