It was this very week last year when we told the world that co-op was coming to Call of Duty. At the time we’d been on the piss with then Infinity Ward head honcho Grant Collier, who had given us the heads-up that plans were afoot to bring a co-op mode to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare via DLC. We told you, you said ‘yay’ and it never happened. We’ll probably never know why, although kickass sales and an avid online community no doubt took the pressure of Infinity Ward’s bank balance enough that they could do without a co-op DLC cash injection six months after launch.
The thing is, Grant wasn’t lying. Co-op was definitely part of Infinity Ward’s vision for their Call of Duty 4 engine, but rather than refine it themselves for a DLC release, they’ve passed on the challenge to developer Treyarch. Treyarch, using the CoD4 engine, will deliver four-player co-op in this Christmas’ Call of Duty: World at War. We’ve just been bashing about in this very mode, and we’re here to tell you it’s just as good as we hoped it would be.
But before we advance, let’s examine the lay of the land.
For the latecomers, developer Infinity Ward – the creators of Call of Duty – demand two years of time for each game they produce, which clashes with publisher Activision’s want of a yearly CoD cash-cow. As a result Treyarch tackles the in-between year iterations, such as 2006’s CoD 3 and this year’s World at War. Despite the less than great results of CoD3, Infinity Ward and Activision obviously have plenty of faith in Treyarch. We recall Grant also throwing his support behind the developer, claiming that Infinity Ward had two years to work on CoD 4, while Treyarch was given a mere eight months for CoD 3. Certainly the disparity in quality of the two games wasn’t as great as that timeline would’ve suggested.
This time around, Treyarch has had much longer to work on their instalment. Unlike last year’s Modern Warfare, the game takes us back to World War II, although this time at the backend of the conflict and on completely different fronts. There are two campaigns, one set in the Pacific, as American forces tackle the Japanese as they island hop from one tropical paradise to the next, and the other on the Eastern Front as Russia moved in on the final capture of Berlin. We played through levels from both.
