Introduction

It would be easy to dismiss Call of Duty: WWII as yet another installment in the CoD series, but the name itself should tell you otherwise. After a few years of Modern Warfare, Black Ops, and even going to space, Sledgehammer Games gets their second full run at the franchise, and we go back to where it all began - World War 2. The last WW2 CoD game was Call of Duty: World at War, which released nearly nine years ago to the day. It was not as well received, and the PC port especially was found lacking. The previous CoD game in the same setting was Call of Duty 3 in 2006, and it was a console-only release, leaving PC gamers wanting more at the time. It is fitting then that today we examine how the latest CoD: WW2 game runs on the PC.

Sledgehammer Games had a good solo debut in the series with Advanced Warfare in 2014 and hopes to carry on from it. The Battlefield franchise made a great comeback with a WW1-inspired setting recently, so nostalgia coupled with good reception to the competition are no doubt key factors here. Call of Duty: WWII is centered around the European theatre of the second World War, and the single-player campaign takes the player through key events. You play as part of a 12-man squad of the American infantry and cover ground in France, occupied Belgium, and, finally, the push into Germany. In addition, there is a separate Nazi zombies story that takes place in an alternate history and draws comparisons to Wolfenstein simply by the nature of it.

The multi-player action kicked off with successful closed and open betas, and as expected, players get to choose sides. Be it the Allies or the Axis, you can choose to play as soldiers in the American, German, British or French Resistance armies, and Sledgehammer Games, along with Activision, will no doubt be looking at other options as DLCs. CoD: WWII chooses to go with divisions instead of classes, and players can choose from among one of five divisions which include the Infantry, Airborne, Armored, Mountain, and Expeditionary. Each division gets a specific combat training, followed by a skill tree to keep people engrossed in the action. This means the perks system is gone, but loot boxes come in hard and strong. In what is perhaps the most obnoxious implementation yet, you can have loot boxes drop alongside other players on Normandy beach, and they can be opened in public for all to see. Time will tell how much, if at all, the game is affected by loot boxes, but we are certainly not impressed.

On the PC side of things, the open beta proved to be very useful for both the developer and the community alike. Bugs were found and crushed, and performance tweaks were implemented throughout as listed here. Both AMD and NVIDIA have released game-ready drivers you can find right here in our downloads section. There is no mention of multi-GPU support specifically for the game from either side, and another thing to note is that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, which launched yesterday, has official support added as well. We have included it in our test bed of GPUs from the last few years, and do continue reading to see how they fare in what has been a hotly anticipated game.