Call of Duty: World at War Review

World at War is the Call of Duty campaign with actual moral weight. Treyarch took the Modern Warfare engine and pointed it at the war's ugliest theaters: flamethrowers scouring Peleliu's bunkers, Banzai charges out of the grass, and an Eastern Front march on Berlin that opens in a fountain of corpses and asks how much of Reznov's vengeance you are willing to share. Gary Oldman's Reznov is the series' best character, and the campaign's willingness to sit in atrocity rather than spectacle gives it a tone no sequel recaptured.

The multiplayer was Modern Warfare's excellent skeleton in olive drab, tanks and bolt-actions included, solid rather than revolutionary, which is where gameplay's A comes from. And then there is the accident of history: Nazi Zombies, a hidden post-campaign lark, spawned a co-op institution that now outdraws some entire franchises. Bleak, confident, and far better than its era's WWII fatigue let people admit.