After three years of futuristic combat, Sledgehammer Games listened to the community by bringing back boots on the ground combat. Sledgehammer Games went with the World War II era, which was way overdue because it’s been almost a decade since we last saw a World War II title in the Call of Duty franchise.

The single player campaign takes place in Europe, mainly between the Americans and the Nazis. The opening mission is Sledgehammer’s creation of D-Day, with players invading Normandy on Omaha Beach. Some of the other missions that we only know right now are Operation Cobra, Train, and Hurtgen Forest. According to Game Informer,”The campaign has a Saving Private Ryan Vibe in terms of depiction of realistic, tragic warfare.”

Sledgehammer Games went with a different approach this year with the campaign. In the previous Call of Duty campaigns, players could pick up ammo off the ground and could regenerate health after being shot at. Now, players have to rely on medics to provide health, as well as other teammates to provide ammunition.

Michael Condrey and the rest of the development team had one huge issue to tackle. They didn’t know if it’s disrespectful to include swastikas into the game at all.

“Ultimately, it was decided to include swastikas in the campaign but not multiplayer or zombies,”  Michael Condrey said. “It was important for us to balance the authenticity of the game and era…We need to balance and respect that but also recognize this is a piece of entertainment and not dishonor the loss of life that happened there.”

In the closed beta, multiplayer was quite enjoyable compared to the last four years of lackluster gameplay. The matches played smooth, the time to kill was great, the respawn system wasn’t bad, and the leveling up system is also decent.

The biggest concerns for most players for multiplayer is the map design, gun balance. Sledgehammer Games designed the maps to have close to medium quarter engagements. This leads to a lot of the player base using the submachine guns instead of using snipers and semi-auto rifles. The developers could easily fix the problem by changing up the lanes of the maps and buff the other weapons.

The major concern the community has is the micro-transactions that Call of Duty has. The developers promised the past three titles (if you include Modern Warfare Remastered) that they won’t add game-changing items to supply drops, but they failed to stick to those promises. This ruins the game because the developers care more about squeezing every penny out of their fans rather than fixing and making the game better.

In Black Ops 3, the developers still add weapons to supply drops and the game is almost two years old. Yet, they still never fixed the frame rate problem, textures still don’t load correctly, and friends still randomly get kicked from the party.

In Infinite Warfare (I don’t recommend this game at all), the game was released when the game was definitely not finished. Combat record, leaderboards, and emblem editing were not added to the game until February 2017. Call of Duty always had these major features in the game at launch, but they had the time to make it to where you could pay for supply drops months before they added those major features.

Then in Modern Warfare Remastered (or Modern Warfare Re-Imagined), we were promised that the game would be true to the original, but that failed a month after the game was released and they added content into the game that wasn’t in the original.

Zombies mode seems to be promising like it is every year. Zombies mode will take place in a Bavarian Village in Germany near the end of World War II. Jon Horsley of Sledgehammer Games mentioned, “Our goal was to make this the most terrifying Zombies experience we’ve ever created.” The founders of Sledgehammer Games were also the creators of the horror game, Dead Space. Overall, zombies will probably be the same like it is every year (try to survive as long as you can), but the developers are going for a more horrific experience.

If you’re looking to buy Call of Duty WWII this November, expect the single-player campaign and the zombies to be well executed. While multiplayer can’t be trusted because of the possibility of game-changing supply drops.