7/1/2023 0 Comments World war ii online naziI’m not suggesting that WWII will turn otherwise well-adjusted human beings into Nazi sympathizers, and it’s not as if this is new territory for first person shooters set during past and present conflicts. Now, that’s obviously a little hyperbolic. That’s the agenda being advanced whenever the Axis forces win a round in WWII. In order to be an effective Axis solider in WWII, you need to forget about the interests you’re serving (at least for the duration of the match). It makes the player’s objectives synonymous with the Nazi’s objectives at that micro level. The multiplayer is framed as a series of small-scale encounters. That’s a problem in any multiplayer game that asks players to fulfill specific objectives, but it’s doubly true in WWII. It is simply impossible to disassociate the Third Reich from the people that carried out its orders, and to suggest otherwise is a dangerous and disingenuous manipulation of the historical record. The successes of the German army directly benefited the Nazi regime and, by extension, the genocidal Nazi platform. Sledgehammer has tried to argue that the multiplayer features German soldiers that do not identify as Nazis, but that distinction is meaningless in the context of WWII. The trouble is that Call of Duty: WWII disassociates the Nazis from the very real horror that they perpetrated across Europe, and those are terrible optics when white supremacy is on the rise in North America. The formula works quite well for millions of other people and I’m glad that those fans have found a game that they enjoy. My complaints about the demo are the same complaints that I’ve been lobbing at the franchise for years and at this point they’re just not all that interesting. However, that does not necessarily make Call of Duty: WWII a bad game. My team lost at least partly because of my poor performance and that feeling of futility is never a lot of fun. I’ve never been a huge fan of Call of Duty and WWII seems to be more of the same. I didn’t particularly enjoy the match itself, but that was to be expected and I don’t want to dwell too much on the mechanics. Unfortunately, the only thing worse than playing as a Nazi is losing to the Nazis, and that’s precisely what happened during my brief multiplayer encounter. I had the opportunity to play as a member of the Allied Forces during a brief multiplayer match on the show floor, for which I was grateful because the thought of playing as a Nazi makes me profoundly uncomfortable. Unfortunately, I’m far less enthusiastic after getting a look at the game at Fan Expo in Toronto, albeit for reasons that were probably not intended. It delivers the same thrills that fans have come to expect from the franchise while introducing a more retro component that brings the series back to its roots after years of more modern military operations. This year’s installment of Call of Duty sends the franchise back to the Second World War with Sledgehammer Games’ Call of Duty: WWII, and it seems like WWII is slated to be another crowd pleaser.
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