Conclusion

The latest installment in Activision's Call of Duty Series takes you to World War II, where you and your platoon fight the Nazis on the Western Front. Sledgehammer Games has returned to the core basics in terms of movement - there is no more double jumping or wall running. A change I definitely like is that health doesn't regenerate automatically. You'll have to use health packs to recover, of which there seem to be a decent amount, at least on normal difficulty. A new feature is that your squad members can provide healing, ammunition, or spot enemies, among other things.

Story-wise, the game starts by putting you on the beaches of Normandy. Further on, you fight more iconic battles at the western front of WW II in Europe, like the Liberation of Paris, the Battle of Aachen, and more. This also means that the story is basically a campaign through World War II with little to no surprises, but interesting elements like stealth, vehicles, and covert operations.

Graphics are surprisingly good and look much better than what we saw in the multiplayer beta. Some textures could do with higher resolution, even on the highest setting, but the majority of visual elements look crisp and richly detailed. There is lots of debris on some maps, and environmental destruction has been added too, but seems a bit more scripted than in Battlefield 1, for example. The addition of real actors (Josh Duhamel and Johnathan Tucker among others) thanks to motion capture makes for an interesting effect where you suddenly feel more like you are playing a movie when you see their faces and hear the voices. Gameplay is of course linear, like all Call of Duty games - no open world, no RPG elements. The game is still quite entertaining, especially if you are into single-player experiences.

COD: WWII seems well optimized for cards from both NVIDIA and AMD, with the respective cards sitting in their expected performance brackets. Sledgehammer is using a DirectX 11 engine which has been updated to support new features, but still seems a bit behind Frostbite (used in the Battlefield titles). Graphics settings are plenty and offer something for everyone to properly dial in their hardware's performance, making it easy to reach playable framerates on even older systems. We gave HBCC on Vega a quick try, but saw no gains, which isn't surprising. Depending on the game, it'll be either hit or miss. Performance-segment cards from three years ago, such as the GTX 970, continue to put out comfortable frame-rates at 1440p.

VRAM usage of the game looks high at first, but when we look at the actual performance numbers, even cards with 3 or 4 GB see no performance hit. It seems the engine tries to fill up as much of the VRAM as possible, just like previous Call of Duty games, even when the texture won't be needed in the near future. This helps avoid stuttering due to disk accesses, of course, but tends to misrepresent actual VRAM usage, causing people to worry.

Overall, COD: WWII is a good console port with enough settings and optimization to make it a pleasant experience on the PC. Whether the game is worth the full price tag, I'm not sure. I'm definitely enjoying the campaign and have no plans for multiplayer. The addition of the Zombies campaign provides more content, once you are done with the main single-player campaign.