Call of Duty: World at War is all you could dream of if you were in a WWII action movie: epic battles across historic warfields, powerful, deadly weapons, and memorable characters. WaW is Treyarch’s fifth mainstream game, and the first installment in the Call of Duty: Black Ops series. That being said, if you happen to get attached to any characters (Reznov fans…), you might just see them in Black Ops and Black Ops 2.

When you first start up the game, you’re taken straight into the boots and soul of Private Miller, a Marine whose fights with his squad against the enemy. The game features your characters and game play fighting in historic, real-life WWII battles, including Okinawa, Stalingrad, Berlin, and the Reichstag.

The action and peril will make you feel as if you were there, fighting the sneaky Japanese and evil Nazis. After a few exhilarating missions in Japan, you jump across the world to play as the Red Army’s Private Petrenko in Europe. Both of these campaigns have you surrounded by the enemy, with no hope of victory or survival. But with a little help from your trusted companions, you defeat the enemies and make it out alive.

The game progresses by going back and forth between the two fronts, with a side mission for each side. You fly planes and bombard Japanese ships in the Marines, and drive tanks and wreak havoc across Germany in tanks as the Red Army. To make any nostalgia you might have come back, Treyarch created campaign missions almost straight from the big screen. That’s right, you’re almost living the movies, now. During a mission in the Marines campaign, you’re assaulting a Japanese base via boats. This explosive and fast-paced moment is similar to the beginning of the famous Tom Hanks film, Saving Private Ryan. And while you’re playing as the Red Army in Stalingrad, you play dead amidst your comrades as the Nazis finish them off. This was almost an exact copy of the film, Enemy at the Gates.

Beat the campaign? Feel like a war hero?  Then step forward into the explosive multiplayer mode.

There you’ll join up with friends (or random people) and battle each other on various maps and with different game modes. Depending on which land you pick, you’ll be able to play as the Marines vs. the Japanese, or the Red Army vs. the Nazi regime. If you feel your gun skills are top in class, then go to the other, more frightening game mode: ZOMBIES. Team up with up to four people for mass survival, or if you’re the braver type, go solo and fight off the hordes of undead Nazis all by yourself.

As good as it is, the game is not without a couple of downfalls. Since WaW is an earlier game and features many new things, including HD graphics and ragdoll physics. Sometimes, if there’s an amazing explosion, or an epic kill, your body might distort across the map, making you look extremely stretched out. You can also lag out and crash if you push the game too hard.

All in all, it’s an amazing game. At the end of the campaign, the credits roll on, and there are messages thanking and remembering all the soldiers who fought and died in WWII. If you think that WaW is the right game for you, then I highly recommend you play it for yourself.