Call of Duty: WWII — War, War Never Changes
“Lest we forget” is a phrase that Canadians are asked to consider once a year, as the country momentarily pauses so that we can remember the sacrifices of Canadians who served in combat. I’m sure that Activision didn’t have Canada (or the UK) in mind when they decided to release Call of Duty: WWII a week before Remembrance Day, but its release is certainly timely and at least forced me to consider how I process the memory of war.
Now, CoD: WWII is very much a game about the American experience in the Second World War, but the game raises several issues that I feel are applicable to anyone who lives in a country involved in that war. Perhaps the biggest issue with the game is the fact that the game itself is fairly routine. Giantbomb’s review of the game noted that the game feels like a retread of Band of Brothers and other seminal modern depictions of WWII, and that’s essentially how I felt about the whole experience.
You play as a soldier haunted by an early childhood experience, looking for a chance to redeem himself in combat. There’s the smart ass whose nickname is “College”, a tough-as-nails sergeant, a compassionate lieutenant that everyone would die for, and the best friend who you are bonded to because the game tells you that you’re close buddies who would watch each other’s backs. Since your character is in the 1st Infantry Division, you essentially play through the events depicted or referred to in the film The Big Red One (1980), starting from D-Day all the way to the Battle of Remagen.
While I’ve written previously about how I’ve been mostly disappointed by the CoD campaigns after Modern Warfare 2 — they’ve stopped innovating entirely and just rely on tired war cliches — I was cautiously optimistic going into this game because of this trailer:
One of the biggest criticisms of the first batch of WW2 games is that while they dutifully replicated the “ping” of the M1 Garand ejecting the cartridge, these games ignored the fact that the Holocaust was happening while all these famous battles were occurring. Although I may be wrong, I believe that this is the first big budget WW2 game to not only have a Jewish character whose Judaism plays an important part in the game’s story, but also actually references the Holocaust and confronts players about the fact that soldiers weren’t the only ones who were suffering during this time.
Unfortunately all that optimism was flushed down the drain when I finished the game. Yes, the Holocaust is an integral part to the game’s denouement. But it’s so trite and perfunctory that it might as well have not been included in the first place. Even the way the Holocaust is brought up is contrived — for some reason these German soldiers, who are being slaughtered by Americans left, right, and center, take the time to capture your best friend in front of your eyes. The only reason they do so is that your character has a reason to go to the Berga concentration camp at the end of the game to kill the Nazi camp commander and rescue your friend right in the nick of time.
The developers turn the Berga concentration camp into a walking simulator sequence, as the player character speaks to you from sometime in the future, telling you about the horrible conditions at the camp and hinting at the atrocities committed by the Nazis while you slowly walk through the camp. It’s a sequence that might have been meaningful nearly 20 years ago in the first Medal of Honor or Call of Duty, but in 2017 it feels like a lazy afterthought. They didn’t even have the courage to create an interactive sequence where you play as the character being forced to serve in Berga, instead relying on what amounts to a cutscene to try to do all the heavy lifting.
It’s frustrating when put in context of an earlier scene where your squad interacts with a group of German civilians. At one point a little girl is separated from the group because she wanted to find her teddy bear, and you volunteer to go find her:
When you find the girl, it becomes a (simplistic) stealth sequence where you hold the girl while trying to sneak past Nazi guards. It’s reminiscent of the first Bioshock, where you can save the Little Sisters, and while not necessarily the most original moment in the game, it’s one that at least tries to get you invested in the moment by making you play through it. The tragic ending to the level — you save the little girl only to see her sister get killed by a German soldier soon after — rises beyond pure cliche because you had a role in creating that moment. I would argue it’s the only interesting interactive moment in the campaign, and even then, it’s not all that original.
Perhaps the other major point to consider is the issue of representation. I’ve seen articles criticizing the campaign for not featuring multiple points of view like the very first Call of Duty, but I understand why they chose to primarily focus on this single squad from the 1st Army. The Call of Duty games have trended away from the anonymous soldier gimmick since Mason and Black Ops, and WWII is no exception. I think it’s fine that the designers wanted to have a focused campaign to try to create characters that players might care about. Certainly Daniels, the character that the player inhabits for most of the game, is the most talkative Call of Duty protagonist ever and the only one with a concrete backstory that starts from childhood.
And I suppose the game should be given some bonus points for featuring diversity as well. There’s a sequence where the player temporary plays as Rousseau, a French resistance operative who works with the 1st Army to help liberate Paris:
Which, incidentally, is probably one of the only times where the player controls a female character for a significant period of time in any Call of Duty game.
The game also acknowledges the big elephant in the room — that America was a racist, segregationist society when they introduce Howard, an engineer who ends up helping the 1st Army during the battle of Bastogne and near the end of the game.
Of course, conveniently the player character and all his friends are the ones who have no problem accepting help from a Black soldier (the most that happens is a short scene where everyone expresses surprise at seeing a Black soldier, before quickly moving on), but it’s an implicit acknowledgement of the contribution that marginalized Americans made during the Second World War.
My problem with this type of representation is that if they wanted to create a campaign that was memorable, it would have been very easy to build a campaign around a character like Howard or perhaps the 442nd Infantry Regiment (the all Japanese-American unit) and address the complicated feelings that come with choosing to defend a country that despises you and treats you as less than human. Certainly it would have been a more interesting meditation on patriotism, nationalism, and the cost of war than the one we got featuring a cast of characters that fell out of a TV Tropes page.
To bring it back to Remembrance Day, I’m reminded of the beaded poppies and the desire to remind Canadians of the contributions that Aboriginal Canadians made during WWII.
Yes, it’s co-opting a symbol used for the purpose of remembering the sacrifice of veterans, but it’s re-contextualizing it to point out that there were Canadians of different backgrounds that contributed to the war effort. For me, I like to take the time to think about Chinese-Canadians who volunteered to serve a nation that not only disenfranchised them but also had a law that banned all Chinese from entering the country. A Call of Duty game that hijacks the traditional narrative of the franchise — that war is hell, but that the player is always fighting on the right side — to try to make us think more about the actual realities of war would have been very exciting. Instead, we get a game that takes few chances and barely tries to take the player out of their comfort zone.
Call of Duty: WWII has the best intentions in trying to produce the familiar WWII experience that we’ve seen countless times before. But the story it tries to tell and the interactive moments that it presents are so dated that it all contributes to a dull and uninspired experience. Much was made about Call of Duty returning to its roots, but I think this is perhaps a confirmation that the Call of Duty experience is one that is simply past its prime.
