Reviews Call of Duty: WWII Review

How long is the SP?

 

6-7 hours going off what people have said on twitter.

 

Meh. Is that even acceptable thesedays?

I replayed COD2 the other month and that took me a couple of days - so will give this a miss.

 

According to the internet people buy the COD and Battlefield games solely for the multiplayer which is why the developers can get away with shitty campaigns for them.

 

It's acceptable rather than great.

Whenever I get annoyed at 6-8 hour games I remember that I beat Medal of Honor 2010 in under 2 hours on the (allegedly) hardest difficulty, now that one was unacceptable.

 

well the trend seems to be either 6-7 hours, probably doable in a single session, or 30+ hour epic...

6-7 hours seems a little short, whereas having to sit through 30 hour yomp seems more like a threat than a promise.

 

Speed runs are hardly comparable to first time play through.

 

I read back the COD2 is just as long, 6hrs rushed, 8hrs average, 11hrs chill mode, might be dependent on each one's play style. (I admit I like to rush FPS's but take my time on RPGs)

 

6 hours 20 mins on regular level for me on first outing. I was a little frustrated with the controls for close, unarmed combat though. In my estimation it is probably worth waiting a few weeks until it hits £28 - £30

 

Busy playing (badly might i say) Multiplayer on the XBOX. I would normally play on PC but my son wanted me to get this on console so we can game together. I really enjoy the game for what it is. Nothing serious, and not jumpy jumpy floor slifding weird stuff from previous versions.

My only complaint is I am god hopeless with a controller. So when my KD ratio is something like 3 / 21, my son will be 19 / 6.

 

Took me about 8 hours on Regular, but I did replay a section a few times to try and do it in stealth.

I don't think eight hours is a bad time. I'd rather eight hours than 30, and don't get me started on The Witcher 3, a game so long I will never ever finish it. It's a pacey eight hours though, very little filler.

Mr Happy - I feel your pain. I'm quite bad with my PS4 controller.

 

I'll rephrase that then.

I beat Medal of Honor 2010 in under 2 hours, on my first and only play through, blind, on the hardest difficulty and with a couple of deaths, failures and restarts. I'm not much a speed runner, that game was just really, really short.

 

The only game I remember coming to the end of and consciously thinking 'wait... was that it? Damn that was short' was the original FEAR

 

Or play one long game instead of five short ones, also much cheaper than multiple games.

Of course as a reviewer you don't really get that option as you need to crank out as many reviews in a timely manner as possible (and even with games you don't necessarily like, after all no one wants to waste hours playing a **** game for a review).
But as a consumer? I'd rather have one game that consumes the next couple months of my free time than faffing about with disposable 8 hour campaigns for £50 a pop.

There is a good reason that games that provide long term entertainment like GTA 5, Witcher 3, Total War Shogun 2, Divinity Original Sin 2 and so on are extremely popular.

 

Honestly, I'd just rather play five good short games than one long game with the pacing all wrong. Happy to play a good long game, I think Heat Sig (which takes ages) and Divinity Original Sin 2 are my favourite games this year.

A thirty hour campaign on an FPS though? Likely to be a lot of stale mechanics and 'shoot respawning enemies forever' in there, and i'd rather a game that was enjoyable from start to finish. Especially now Steam and Humble mean that if you're not sure on a game you can just wait six months and pick it up for a fiver. The length of games I review has very little sway on me though, more fussed about doing a good job.

There are exceptions to this in both ways, it's just that as I'm getting older my time is limited. I think there are reasons to enjoy both, but I really don't think an eight hour campaign is acceptable, especially as I finished Call of Duty 2's campaign in a similar timeframe. CoD gets a lot of bad press for its campaigns, but I've never really had a problem with the length and I hate the multiplayer ever since I got too slow to compete properly.

Of course, I get there are people for whom each hour of gameplay needs to have a financial return because no one has unlimited money, but in that case I would wait until the game gets cheap and give it a go. Or just don't buy it, I suppose. We're lucky that games like Divinity and The Witcher are still coming out a couple times a year, so there's lots of choice. I'm a consumer before I'm a reviewer, always have been, probably always will be.

 

Recent CoDs have had that odd style of pushing the player from over the top set piece to over the top set piece feel to it, so maybe to some extent it isn't about actual length measured in pure hours, but rather that it can feel like you are being rushed through that triggers the complaints.

Personally I can play a short game and be happy with it if it offers some interesting hook like for example Hellblade, but if its just another paint by the numbers entry in a long running series? No thanks.
Hellblade doesn't exactly last long and has close to zero replay value, so on that front it is just like the average CoD campaign, but it does compensate for those shortcomings with things the AAA industry will never dare to do.

Or maybe I should start admitting to myself that I'm just a bitter old man who has played too many stellar games to see the value in an ok one.

 

I bought this last night, feels good to be back and playing a good no-nonsense COD game. Without the exoskeletons and wrist rocket style grenades. Not to mention playing as my childhood Doctor Who in zombies mode is brilliant

 

Played it, enjoyed the single player