In the last two years of World War II, Pvt. Miller and Pvt. Petrenko, two allied soliders, will fight to end WWII. In famous battlefields from Pelelieu to Seelow Heights, Call of Duty World at War delivers brutal action, intense sieges, desperate stands, and memorable characters. Using any weapons at your disposal, from Thompson SMGs, to Flamethrowers, to T34 tanks, fight back the evil of the Fascist Reich and the Japanese Empire in the fifth installment in the Call of Duty Franchise.
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In the mission Semper Fi, some Banzai Chargers will actually lie on the ground pretending to be corpses before springing up with a bayonet the second you walk past them. Cheap trick, but it works every time on a first playthrough.
If you understand Japanese, the soldiers who scream when Miller sets them alight with the flamethrower are actually shouting 'API!' or 'PANAS!' - Indonesian and Malay words for fire - rather than anything Japanese. It suggests these particular enemies are meant to be conscripted Heiho soldiers, not full Imperial Japanese Army troops.
In the Breaking Point level specifically, you'll notice a chunk of the Japanese soldiers are wearing glasses - a character model detail that, oddly, doesn't show up on enemies in any other mission in the entire campaign.
Every Call of Duty game before this one opened with a gentle little training section to teach you the basics. World at War throws that out entirely and drops you straight into a brutal war crime as your opening scene - a real tonal shift for the series at the time.
Mortally wounded Japanese soldiers in the Pacific campaign will sometimes prime a grenade with their dying breath, hoping to take an American down with them on the way out. It's a small AI touch that makes finishing off downed enemies feel genuinely risky.
The PTRS-41 shows up in the game as a sniper rifle, but in real life it's actually an anti-tank rifle designed to fire a massive 12.7x108mm armour-piercing round at vehicles, not snipe individual soldiers.
The Peleliu missions throw a fair few banzai charges at you, but historically there were barely any actual banzai attacks during that battle - the Japanese mostly dug into underground bunkers and fought defensively rather than charging out into the open like the game shows.
During the mission Their Land, Their Blood, Reznov tells you to use your 'Molotovs' - except historically it's unlikely any Soviet soldier would've used that term, since it was actually the Finns who coined the nickname during the Winter War. Black Ops apparently fixed this line two years later.
The mission Black Cats hands you control of a third character flying an American patrol boat, raiding Japanese supply ships and pulling survivors out of the water. It's a clear nod to the Death From Above gunship mission from Call of Duty 4, just swapped for the Pacific setting.
Jumping from the modern setting of Call of Duty 4 back to World War II meant losing gadgets like night vision goggles - but World at War compensates by handing the Soviet campaign Molotov cocktails and the Pacific campaign a flamethrower, two nasty new toys the series hadn't really used before.
