Call of Duty: WWII Review

The jetpacks came off, and the relief in the reception was audible. Sledgehammer rebuilt the series around ground movement and, more interestingly, took health regeneration away. Your squadmates carry medical kits, ammunition and grenades, and asking for them ties the campaign's fiction to its systems better than anything the series had attempted in a decade. The story follows a rifle company from the beach through the Hurtgen Forest, and while it hits the familiar beats, it slows down often enough to let the war read as grim rather than exhilarating, including a concentration camp sequence handled with more care than anyone expected.

Headquarters, a shared social space where you open supply drops in front of other players, was an idea whose time had not come and was rightly abandoned. Multiplayer divisions replaced the create-a-class system with rigid archetypes and got walked back within a year. It is not the best campaign in the series and the map design is unremarkable, but as a correction after three years in the air it did exactly what it needed to.