Call of Duty: World at War First Impressions

Last Tuesday, I was sitting at work watching the tweets pop up like always, when I saw that Direct2Drive was about to have a trivia contest. The first five people to answer correctly would get a free game of their choice from the D2D catalog. I decided to go to the Twitter website directly to get a better chance. As soon as I got there, I saw the question... it had been posted only 10 seconds previous. A quick Google search allowed me to reply with an answer not 30 seconds after the question had been posted. I was so convinced I was going to win, I actually started looking through their catalog. Well, 10-15 minutes later, I got a message congratulating me and asking me what game I wanted. I decided on Call of Duty: World at War for a couple of reasons:

• I didn't care if I had a boxed copy or not
• It was still $50 in store and was unlikely to drop in price soon
• I knew it had some really good co-op play

At this point, let me provide a mini-review of the Direct 2 Drive experience.

The short version: it sucked.

I've purchased a handful of games on Steam, mostly when they were cheap and on sale, and each time the experience was exceptionally painless. I start it downloading, can pause it, and just wait for it to finish. When it gets done, it's ready to play and fully patched.

But with D2D, you have to go to their website, login, then find the my account link (it was a bit hidden in my opinion). After that, you can download your game. While they seem to have a download manager that may ease the process (I generally HATE 3rd party download managers), it didn't just "work" in Firefox for some reason and I found myself downloading the game manually. 15+ hours later, I had all 7 GBs downloaded. The file I downloaded was a .zip file, which I then tried to extract. Just using the Windows 7 zip tools, I was absolutely unable to extract the zip file; the last file in the pack just wouldn't extract properly. If I was an "average" computer user, I would have given up right then and there. I, however, quickly pulled up 7-zip and was able to extract the last file. The install process was simple enough, but I was absolutely shocked when I discovered I was installing what was basically version 1.0 of the game. In a digital format like that, I saw no reason I couldn't have just downloaded a complete and final version. I quickly discovered that it would take 3 patches and 2 MORE GBs of downloading to get up to date. One more day elapsed, and I finally had the game downloaded and up to date. While I didn't mind jumping through hoops for a free game, it didn't exactly make me want to go buy a bunch more from their store.

With the game finally working, my friend and I started up a co-op game. The game actually does this pretty well as it has an integrated friends list and you can use that to invite each other to games. We didn't have to monkey with port forwarding or Hamachi or anything crazy like that. In today's age of NATs and shared internet connections, it's good to see somebody get something like that right.

In co-op play, both you and your friends play the role of the same character (even sharing the same viewpoint during cutscenes). In combat, the game plays basically exactly as it would in single player, but with two (or more of you). In short, it works really well. In addition, the game has a unique set of challenges for the co-op mode. This means that you can actually level up your multiplayer profile in co-op play, something I think is a REALLY nice touch. At the end of each chapter, we were able to compare kill counts, headshots, deaths, etc. This was fun as it allowed us to play and work together, while still maintaining a bit of competitiveness to the game. At the end of our three-hour play session, I knew one thing: ALL GAMES NEED CO-OP.

As for the actual game play, it was familiar and more or less exactly what I was expecting. For better or worse (in my opinion: for better), the game is basically Call of Duty 4 (same engine, etc) set during World War II. While the WWII market is already pretty saturated, they manage to make it fresh, mostly by focusing on some less played scenarios like the Americans fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. The game hasn't had many surprises so far, playing more or less exactly as I'd expect. All told, it's been a lot of fun, and I can't wait to finish the rest of the missions in co-op mode.

In conclusion: Direct 2 Drive = not great. World at War = a blast in co-op. Free games = AWESOME.