STACK July 2017 Issue 153

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When 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
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
visit GAMES FEATURE
ACTIVISION
Answering
The Call Of
Duty
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
Call of Duty:WWII
Words Paul Jones and Alesha Kolbe
058 JULY 2017