The war against the Japanese was proving a little bit more than I could handle on my own, what with all the machine gun emplacements, hidden snipers in treetops and entrenched soldiers. So I called up my buddy Adam, and begged for his service. See, in Call of Duty: World at War, you can play every mission cooperatively with a friend on the same system, or with up to three of your friends online. Adam recommended we play competitively versus cooperatively; the main difference being that competitive play offers scoring, which makes it a little easier to tell when you've brained a bad guy. We also had found secret Death Cards on levels that act as cheat codes for the game. Like the Skulls in Halo 3, these Death Cards change the game slightly, both in your favor and against it. We opted to play without them though -- my Berserker rage will have to wait for another day -- and went into our mission.
Luckily for Adam, he was able to tote the flamethrower around to wipe out those pesky fortified threats, while I was armed with my M1 Garand. Adam ran off on his own, with me holding up the rear, and just as I was beginning to think I might get a little bored playing clean-up, down he went. "I'm dead! Oh man, I'm in a bad spot," Adam cried out, and I saw him fending off rushing soldiers with his pistol in a Last Stand-esque pose. He wasn't dead, but would be if I didn't get over to him fast. I picked off the soldiers and ran beside him so I could revive him without fear. If we both had died, we would have to restart from the last checkpoint.
With Adam back on his feet, we opted to stick together. I'd scan the trees and take out enemies that appeared on the ledges above us, while he would flame everything in front of him. The more enemies we killed, the more our score increased, adding multipliers as our kill streaks continued. In this way, we were playing together, not separately and effectively moving through the level, removing threats as they appeared. But the level left us enough freedom to play as we would normally, without being too open so that we'd never see each other. Of course, the enemy wasn't happy about our progress and would rain grenades down on us whenever they could. We'd yell back and forth that we were tossing them back, and in one instance, I tossed a poorly aimed grenade that bounced back at us. Adam threw it into the face of a soldier, and we both received an Achievement for it. There are a few cooperative achievements, like getting a headshot at the same time, or engaging for close melee kills simultaneously, and we had just stumbled upon one of them.
We finished our mission with an epic battle against tanks and soldiers, way too many than we could have handled with basic weapons. I manned an AA gun and blew up some tanks, while Adam toasted bad guys that got too close. I blew up and Adam revived me, Adam got sniped and I revived him. On completion, we received our score with myself receiving special bonuses for having the most revives and headshots, as well as a multiplier for the difficulty level setting. Best of all, by completing some challenges like accruing kill assists or kill streaks, we earned experience. This XP instantly translated to the other multiplayer modes, allowing us to rank up and unlock goodies in which to use in online play.
As you can imagine, the cooperative play of Call of Duty: World at War is a blast, and we didn't even play a mission with vehicles or the special "Nazi Zombies" mode. We can't wait to take the action online with other friends and watch how the game reacts. With unique challenges and exclusive game modes for cooperative play, we'll absolutely be giving Call of Duty: World at War another tour when it's released.
Posted: 4 Nov 2008
