STACK #153 Jul 2017

GAMES FEATURE

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ACTIVISION

Call of Duty:WWII

Answering The Call Of Duty Words Paul Jones and Alesha Kolbe

W hen Activision announced that Sledgehammer Games were taking the franchise back to its roots in late April, the publisher had finally given its fanbase what it wanted – good old boots-on-the- ground vintage combat. EA had shown that there's a nouveau appetite for traditional military shooters when it released Battlefield 1 to critical and commercial success last year. And Bethesda’s excellent 2014 Wolfenstein reboot proved that the desire to shoot Nazis in video games hasn't diminished. Activison’s

decision (and to be fair, one it was pressured to make – it wasn’t that long ago that gamers were deriding WW2 and contemporary- based shooters) to introduce future-tech, settings and abilities to CoD, alienated its core fanbase, mutating the series’ DNA to the point of making it practically unrecognisable. Following last year’s commercially-pummeled Infinite Warfare , there’s a lot riding on the success of Call of Duty: World War II . Marketing and PR babble will carry a game so far, but the only way to truly silence your

critics is to release a quality title. From what we saw at E3 this year, and the response from those we spoke to who also played it, the publisher has taken a huge step in that direction. The queues to jump on WWII were ridiculous during show hours, so we were thankful for a 6.00pm after hours industry ‘lock-in’ to play the game. Even then the lines were long, but we managed to get on at the latter part of the session and outrightly refused to get off. The first multiplayer map featured a team deathmatch

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JULY 2017

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