2  2 out of 5 stars

Call of Duty WWII’s multiplayer has lacked enjoyment for fans who have played the franchise for years. However, for this installment of the venerated series Sledgehammer Games took Call of Duty back to its roots to attempt to win back long-time players and attract newcomers. Nonetheless, many fans are turning away from the game because Sledgehammer is failing to provide stability, variety, and balanced gameplay.

When a new Call of Duty title launches, the servers usually tend to crash due to hundreds of thousands of players flooding the servers at once, but this year the problem has been particularly bad, making WWII one of the worst launches ever for Call of Duty.

Gamers lucky enough to access the multiplayer would still end up frustrated because they would regularly get disconnected and their progress wouldn’t count.

Sledgehammer Games and Activision should have anticipated the problem. As a multi-billion dollar company, Activision should have spent more on the servers. While most gamers could forgive a few crashes at launch, the inconsistency shouldn’t last until December.

Sledgehammer Games also flopped on variety in the game. There are only nine multiplayer maps (not including Carentan) in the game. However, there are three other maps exclusive to war mode, but not everyone wants to play long matches at a time.

Not only is the map variety insufficient, but the weapons are too. Not including DLC weapons, all weapon categories have four or fewer weapons to choose from except for rifles and submachine guns. This makes it hard for players to stay engaged.

The developers are also having a hard time balancing weapons. Sledgehammer designed the maps for close quarter engagements, which means that fully automatic weapons dominate the game.

While weapon balancing is a towering issue, gunfights are very inconsistent. It’s unbelievable that Call of Duty still has a flinching mechanic. All flinching does is lead to gunfights where no one has an advantage. If a player has great gun fighting skills, it means nothing when there’s a flinching mechanic because when the player is shooting at an enemy, it causes the enemies gun to kick upwards. When the enemies sights are on the player’s head, all the enemy has to do is land one or two shots for a kill.

Multiplayer does offer one good new feature. In the new headquarters, players can interact with each other when not playing in a match, test guns at the shooting range, publically open their supply drops, battle other players in the one-on-one pit, and show off their gear.

It’s great to see Sledgehammer Games wants the community to be a community again because this aspect has been dying in Call of Duty for years.

Call of Duty WWII does have a lot of problems, but it still has the potential to be a great first-person shooter.

When the developers fix the main issues with multiplayer, I would recommend playing multiplayer, but for now, I would wait.