YMMV / Call of Duty: WWII

• Aluminium Christmas Trees:
  • Reflex sights, while uncommon for infantry during World War II, were invented and used (mostly by pilots) during that time. The round reflex sight is based on the Nydar Reflex Sight from 1945, while the smaller reflex sight found on the Stg 44 is based on the Mark III Free Gun Reflector Sight◊, first produced in 1943.
  • While they may seem like examples of Improperly Placed Firearms, the Soviet PPSh-41 and SVT-40 were indeed used by the Germans◊, as they had captured thousands of examples on the Eastern Front. Some of the captured PPShs were rechambered to fire 9mm rounds, and used under the designation MP41(r), while the unmodified guns, re-designated as MP717(r), were fed 7.63x25mm Mauser rounds with no issue (since their intended 7.62x25mm Tokarev bullets were physically identical to the Mauser round, just with more propellant). The SVT-40s saw widespread use under the designation G.259(r), as Germans were short of self-loading rifles, with the weapon itself serving as the basis/inspiration for the Walther G43 self-loading rifle. The G43 would be added to the game post-launch as a Supply Drop weapon that's also obtainable via completion of challenges.
  • Despite the fact that most rifle extended magazines in the game are incorrectly depicted as being detachable, the M1 Garand is one of the few cases where it is appropriate, since there are experimental variants with detachable BAR magazines. Some of these eventually evolved into the M14.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Heinrich is proposed as the one that murdered Rosseau's family and the commander in charge of the French occupation by the Nazis, with a build-up and personal meeting that makes it seem like he'll be the Big Bad, or at least the Disc-One Final Boss. Rosseau promptly overpowers him when he knows who she is and stabs him to death without much effort in a swift quick-time-event and he's brushed over as a completely incidental bump in the road. Another antagonist in Metz shows up and, similarly, sets up a climatic encounter only to die in the final gameplay moments where the only way to fail is to not try shooting him, not even getting the vague development Heinrich had.
• Awesome Music: Wilbert Roget, II's music for the game is quite remarkable, which odes a lot to Michael Giacchino's work on the very first game in the franchise, while giving off a vibe that the late James Horner or Alan Silvestri scored this game based on the arrangement and recording of the score and its Orchestral Bombing cues.
• Base-Breaking Character: Pierson. Some absolutely hate him for his callousness and aloofness towards Daniels (to say nothing of his refusal to rescue civilians or POWs). However, others are more sympathetic towards him given how he has a rather tragic backstory and an actual character arc.
• Cliché Storm: The whole campaign seems to be a mishmash of every single cliche one would expect from both a World War II story and a Call Of Duty campaign. Character-wise, the hero is a simple country boy with a girl back home, his immediate superior officer is a jerkass, one of his squadmate is a nerd, and his commander is a benevolent father figure, and so on. Gameplay-wise, there are mandatory turret sequences, vehicle sections, and slow-mo shootouts just like the ones seen in previous campaigns.
• Complete Monster:
  • Main campaign: Hauptsturmführer Metz is the SS commandant in charge of sending hundreds of American POWs to labor camps throughout Europe, where they would be worked and tortured to death. Trying to separate the Jews from his next batch of American POWs, Metz shoots one for no reason and beats up Robert Zussman when he refuses to comply with his demands before sending him and the other POWs to his own labor camp; the 1st Infantry Division arrives there, discovering the numerous corpses caused by Metz's cruelty throughout the burned-down camp, many of whom he starved and tortured to death. Metz is last seen executing his remaining prisoners before nearly executing Zussman.
  • Nazi Zombies:
    • Doctor Peter Glücksbringer Straub is a Nazi instructed by Adolf Hitler himself to create a new type of soldier that doesn't rest or fear death. Finding a mystical sword hilt in Mittelburg, he used the energy from it to kill his own men, resulting in these soldiers becoming walking corpses. Believing he found his perfect soldiers, Straub would then use the sword hilt to turn the town's entire population into undead abominations, having a subordinate sewn onto one of them alive when he learns of his ties to the Allies. Leaving Mittelburg, Straub goes to the island of Heligoland where he stored thousands of his creations and takes them to his Zeppelins. He then travels to Berlin so he can unleash them and kill off every human being in the city, allowing him to reclaim what's left of it for the Nazis, while he continues to take pride in creating what he believes to be the Devil.
    • The God-King was the ruler of the Thulian Civilization before he was slain by the Raven Lords to end his tyranny. However, his spirit continued to linger and influence events where through his mystical sword, he corrupted Fredrick Barbarossa into becoming a ambitious tyrant like him and would give the Nazi scientist Peter Straub the knowledge on how to create his own zombified army, at the cost of thousands of innocent lives. When Straub gets killed, the God-King takes over Straub's army where he has them ravage the world and kill untold millions. He would go on to brainwash Vivian Harris into reviving him before killing her once she served her purpose and would nearly kill her allies while declaring on his desire to rule over what's left of the world.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Enemies wielding the Toggle-Action with Incendiary Rounds are some of the hardest enemies in the campaign to fight. They hit with enough power to make you think they're wielding a rifle. They become very common later on as well.
  • Panzerschreck-wielding Nazis can instantly kill you if their rockets land anywhere near you, and like above, the game starts throwing multiple of them at once in certain sequences just to force you to react fast or die.
• Fandom Rivalry: Call of Duty once again came head-to-head with its old competitor, Battlefield. However, this time the rivalry is even more vitriolic as Battlefield 1 having came out the year before with a similar historical throwback theme comparable to Call of Duty: WWII. Fans of the two games have argued with each other over which game is more historically authentic, innovative and fun. The only thing anyone can agree on is that Battlefield 1 got one hell of a head-start.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, released in 2007, was widely praised for abandoning the World War II shooter genre for a modern take. Exactly ten years later, Call of Duty: WWII is widely praised for returning to the World War II setting.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • While the return to the classic "boots on the ground" setting is well-received, some felt that multiplayer didn't take full advantage of the historical setting. Given the small map sizes and low recoil on automatic weapons, the current meta is dominated by submachine guns and assault rifles at the expense of the more iconic and ubiquitous semi-auto and bolt-action rifles of World War 2. For some, this has resulted in the game feeling too much like the fast-paced Modern Warfare games instead of the slower-paced historical games that WWII is trying to emulate.
  • As noted in Hollywood History on the main page, the campaign is focused exclusively on the Western Front and the main characters are US Army soldiers. Given how there have been an overabundance of Call of Duty games that featured Americans vs Nazis in Western Europe, some fans wished that the game could've also focused on different theaters of the war, like the North African, Pacific or Italian fronts (the latter of which being a conflict almost never touched by any of the games), or even different units, such as Japanese-American soldiers of the 442nd Infantry Regiment.
• Jerkass Woobie: Pierson, who is generally a callous and aloof sergeant who used to be a A Father to His Men in the past until a mistake he made resulted in the deaths of his men. Up the events of the game, his failure has haunted him and turned him into the bitter NCO he's become.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Some are only interested in playing the Nazi Zombies mode while ignoring everything else; many horror fans are particularly looking forward to this mode since many of Sledgehammer's staff, including co-founders Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey, have previously worked on Dead Space
• Memetic Mutation: A weird announcer glitch on the War mode causes the announcer's voice to suddenly go to eardrum-shattering levels of volume. The sheer unexpectedness and frequency of this glitch caused a few specific quotes that this glitch happens on to go memetic, namely "A BOMB'S BEEN PLANTED ON OUR AMMO SUPPLY!" and "B IS RETREATING, KEEP FIRING!" Rather unfortunately, this glitch was eventually patched.
• Most Wonderful Sound: At the end of the teaser trailer, the sound of a M1 Garand's ping is notably one of the finest things to hear. Even if one hates the teaser, M1 Garand's ping is a welcoming noise.
• Narm:
  • Zussman's knife wound in the first chapter is supposed to be a dramatic moment and bring panic. However, it comes across as very silly given how Zussman looks perfectly fine model wise, making it look like Daniels is freaking out over a relatively shallow wound instead of the life-threatening injury that the game tries to sell it as. Plus he has no blood on his model from the wound either, which while not outright needed, makes it look like people are being overly dramatic.
  • Daniels' narrations are so jarring, out of place, and disconnected usually from what is going on that it makes what are supposed to be serious moments down right silly. For example, at the end of the fourth level, right after meeting the French Resistance, he starts narrating about Rousseau mid cutscene with no build up, causing the rest of the audio to stop to he can talk. It is so out of place that many thought it was a mistake at first.
  • The over-the-top train crash at the end of S.O.E. is pretty difficult to take seriously. Basically, Daniels and Zussman catch up to the armored train in a jeep and took out many of its occupants, but then a grenade causes them to veer straight onto the tracks sideways, derailing the trainhead while they bail. The first few dozen train cars derails normally, but all of a sudden the traincars behind them shoots across the screen like being launched by a train-catapult. The game spends a good 30 seconds launching traincars across the screen, causing explosions, big crashing noises, and destruction, all the while Daniels sits in the middle of an open field miraculously avoiding the flying train cars.
• Older Than They Think:
  • This isn't the first Call of Duty title to cover the 1st Infantry Division. Treyarch actually beat Sledgehammer by 12 years with Call of Duty 2: Big Red One in 2005.
    • And a year before that, there was Call of Duty: Finest Hour, which was the first appearance of the 1st Infantry Division in the series.
  • Many younger fans were surprised that the game's campaign has non-regenerative health even though this mechanic was present in the very first Call of Duty game.
  • The fact that swastikas won't appear in multiplayer due to German laws caused considerable outcry, though this was already the case in the previous Call of Duty games set in World War II.
  • Several people praised the inclusion of Rousseau as a playable character, some calling it the first playable female character in the series. Tanya Pavelovna was a playable character (and for more than half a mission) in Call of Duty: Finest Hour back in 2004.
    • Medal of Honor: Underground was also mentioned in the discussion as it was an entire FPS that starred a female character, also a member of the French Resistance.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: While the game has since been Vindicated by History to a certain extent, WWII is primarily remembered in the public conscious for being the game that two gamers had an online dispute over, which led to the 2017 Wichita swatting incident and the death of an uninvolved man.
• The Scrappy: Anna, of the Damsel Scrappy and The Load variety. While the intention was to evoke sympathy, she has not been well-liked given her lack of personality and general helplessness with Daniels having to rescue her after she runs off from her sister Erica. Not to mention that she put the squad's mission on jeopardy and got her sister killed due to a stray bullet from a German attack thanks to the escape being delayed because of her.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • While not as reviled as other games, the loot box isn't considered the best reward system largely for having new weapons and skins locked behind it. Not helping matters is how a July 2019 update had several weapons that could only be unlocked by loot boxes.
  • Explosives are highly lethal in this game, and getting hit directly by or even being close to a panzerschreck's rocket detonation is fatal compared to past games where you'd likely be severely wounded and then heal away if you hide fast enough afterwards. Naturally, the game starts peppering later levels with them, and while they're somewhat inaccurate as the rockets veer off-course usually, there are segments with several of the bastards at once that are intended to kill you by peppering your position with instantaneous death.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • In what is either a bizarre animation error or an equally bizarre easter egg, during the empty "tacticool" reload for the SVT-40 (i.e. using a fresh magazine to press the magazine release and knock out the empty magazine), you can see the fresh magazine fly out of the player's hand with the empty magazine. The character left hand then instantly gets a new magazine offscreen and puts it in.
  • When Red gets incapacitated during an artillery strike and sees a hallucination of his brother giving him a pep talk, the character in question's face is mostly in shadow, but just visible enough so that you can see that his lips aren't moving when he speaks.
  • In the intro cutscene, at one point the knife clips through Zussman's fingers rather than go in between them.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • Pierson may be an insensitive asshat but he's right to be pissed off at Daniel's insubordination. In an attempt to save the captured Zussman, Daniels disobeyed orders, pushed Pierson, and then stole his jeep (in the middle of a battle) while jeopardizing the mission in the process. Not to mention that Pierson previously lost several of his men in a rescue attempt at Kasserine, hence why he would dismiss rescue missions as pointless. Daniel is pretty lucky Pierson didn't just shoot him right there after catching up with him.
  • And the previous mission on Aachen tried to make him less empathetic, but actually give him some points unintentionally regarding evacuating the civilians out of the hotel. Since they are basically underground, sending them into a hostile battle zone to escape from a truck made Turner look like an idiot^note Granted, the Germans ended up making their way into the basement eventually, but nobody in the squad had any way of knowing that.. Not to mention that Anna's sister got killed by a stray bullet penetrating the tarp cover.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: While the game's general quality is contentious, to say the least, a lot of people do have praise for the Nazi Zombies sub-mode in that it's a big step up from Sledgehammer's previous Exo Zombies and Infinite Warfare Zombies, if only for a more consistent tone and quality.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Roget's Orchestral Bombing Leitmotif for the game sounded similar to the high octane theme from Capricorn One by Jerry Goldsmith, except with the music notes rearranged. Listen here and here for comparison.
• Tainted by the Preview: With the release of the beta, reception of the game has been rather mixed. While there is no shortage of fans praising the gameplay, many other longtime fans have complained that WWII sticks to the same basic Call of Duty formula that has made the franchise feel stale and doesn't try to do anything new to set itself apart from its predecessors.
• That One Achievement: Besides the usual "beat the campaign on Veteran" as common for Call of Duty games, there's "One of the Lucky Few," which requires you to breach the seawall on the first mission in less than two minutes, without taking machine-gun fire. Said first level is the D-Day landing. Worse, there's no safe path, meaning you'll simply have to revert from the checkpoint until you can get lucky.
• That One Level: The 6th mission "Collateral Damage" in generally disliked for its forced stealth elements and unlikable characters. Near the end of the mission, Daniels has to rescue Anna from a building swarming with German soldiers. What makes this level particularly infuriating is that Daniels has to carry Anna to safety without any means to defend themselves, forcing him to take the stealth approach while she spends several minutes loudly whimpering into his face. Outside of that, it's also the first level where enemies with rocket-launchers start popping up, and regardless of difficulty, they instantly kill you if they hit even remotely close to you.
• Tear Jerker: Turner's death. He sacrifices himself to the hoards of Nazis, while his men hold Daniels back from trying to vainly rescue him. He only manages to get one enemy killed before going down. The agony on Daniel's face, makes it all the more emotional.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Given the sheer abundance of class-based multiplayer shooters, some have accused the game of stealing ideas from other similar games. The WWII setting has drawn accusations that the game was trying to recreate the success of Battlefield 1's historical throwback angle. The asymmetric multi-staged multiplayer War mode was accused of copying modes like Operations of Battlefield 1 and Escort of Overwatch. The Headquarters social space, the arguably most important innovation to the Call of Duty series, is seen as an imitation of the social spaces in both Destiny and Destiny 2.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Although the developers have stated that the game will tackle the Holocaust, some commentators felt that the game didn't really handle the subject well. For much of the game, the Nazis aren't shown carrying many on-screen atrocities against non-Germans and their racist ideologies aren't really discussed in-depth. The Holocaust was really only briefly acknowledged in the final epilogue with Daniels encountering an abandoned concentration camp while searching for Zussman.
  • On a similar note, there's a subplot in which Daniels's squadmate Frank Aiello has to overcome his racial animosity to work with an African-American soldier named Marcus Howard. On paper it sounds like a good character arc, but it comes so late into the story and is interrupted by so many timeskips that Aiello and Marcus aren't shown developing an authentic onscreen friendship. Furthermore, outside of the first mission in which Marcus appears, Aiello never shows any overt prior signs of racism, making it come across an Informed Flaw, and Aiello's racism was abruptly resolved with a simple apology. It comes across less like a compelling character arc and more like An Aesop being thrown in to say "Racism is bad!" without putting the work into making it fit naturally.
• Tough Act to Follow: Being the first game after Call of Duty: World at War to return to the Second World War, it naturally had this issue. While it's visually impressive and overall plays well, the inclusions to the game such as loot boxes, the very linear story focusing on one front, and the dumbing down of many elements from World At War meant it was on the negative end of this.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Comparisons to Battlefield 1's Operations mode aside, the new multiplayer mode War has been praised as a new addition to the Call of Duty gameplay that captures the exciting cinematic experience of the single-player campaign. However, there are only 3 maps at launch, leading to some players getting bored and leaving the mode. Fortunately, Sledgehammer added more War mode maps via DLC.
  • During the campaign, you can find moments where German soldiers surrender and you are able to help pressure them into doing so. It does a lot to help humanize them, since not everyone in the German army was in it by choice, but it only happens in scripted sections, and the player gets no benefits or changes for doing so. It also rarely happens, making it a strange inclusion.
• Vindicated by History: It's subtle, but there are a good amount of people looking back on the once-mocked game with a little more fondness (especially when it comes to the concept of adding extra weapons and monetization) after the absolute horror show Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 would become to many. The extensive post-season support and being the last COD game on Steam after Black Ops 4 jumped ship to Battle.net helped for many.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The Normandy Landing scene, it looks like it was taken straight out of Saving Private Ryan and the best bit is when the sea starts to turn red with blood.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • Broken Base aside, many fans had been disappointed with the franchise moving further into the future after Modern Warfare 3. The mere announcement that the series was returning to World War II caused fans to rejoice. Given how the game grossed $550 million in 3 days (more than double that of Infinite Warfare), it's safe to say that fans are coming back.
  • The Loot system, which Sledgehammer Games first introduced in Advanced Warfare, is the fairest of all the games it has featured in. While there is a random element to receiving crates as well as being able to buy them with COD Points, you earn them through completing orders and contracts, leveling up to specific ranks and through things like Twitch Prime loot. In addition, things you can get from the loot crates can also be bought directly via Armory Credits, earned daily and from payroll, as well as completing matches. Lastly, while DLC weapons did make an early appearance in the "Winter Siege" event, they could be bought through the Armory Credits method, as well as via the Special Orders which rotated through each of the five weapons and had a very simple requirement to unlock.

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