Call of Duty: World at War [X360]

Vehicles are only available on the larger maps; there are only four of them in total, but they're larger than anything seen in Modern Warfare. Some of them are perfect for vehicle warfare, like Seelow, which is set in farmland. Others require a lot of infantry support. I had a lot of fun in Outskirts, a village level that's a warren of narrow streets and which is one of the largest levels in the game. The village is built on a slight hill, and in the middle there's a church steeple that's perfect for observation and sniping. This is a brutal map due to the close-in nature; you'll literally go street-to-street to house-to-house to room-to-room. Drive a vehicle down a narrow road and you can get hammered by infantry holed up in buildings.

Outskirts is also a crazy fun map to play war mode. This is actually a mode that premiered in Call of Duty 3, and it has returned in World at War. In War mode, the objective is to capture five flag points on the map. The trick is that only one flag is in contention at a time, and this focuses the entire battle on that point. It seems odd to say that the fighting for control of these points was savage, but it was. My team came close to winning, but the defenders dug in like they were the Soviets at Stalingrad and denied us the last flag. That meant that time ran out and we had to go into overtime, which is a battle for control of a single flag. Keep in mind, there's a slight respawn penalty to the team that the game judges was losing during most of regulation, so if you're barely holding on at the end, you're still in trouble in overtime.

Another new mode is capture the flag, which plays just like it sounds like. Both teams have a flag and must capture the opposing team's flag and return it back. The first time to capture the flag three times wins. You can only score if your flag is back at your base, though, so you get in those situations where you'll have the flag but you can't score, which creates a dilemma. You need to send your team out to kill the enemy flag carrier and recover your flag (simply touching the flag when it's on the ground will reset it), but the enemy is also trying to do the same, since they need to recover their flag in order to score. To keep things fair since the maps are not symmetrical, capture the flag consists of two rounds, and in the second round the teams switch sides on the map to neutralize any geographical advantages. Since each round can last 10 minutes, a capture the flag game can go twice as long, making it one of the longest modes in the game.

Another new feature in World at War is a squad mechanic, which is a bit like the squad system in Battlefield 2. Squads let you create small groups within a team, and the advantage is that you not only spawn close to each other, but the squad leader can issue orders that the rest of the squad sees. Even better, squads stick together between rounds and matches, so it's a fast way to party together without having to drop out to the menu.

Playing through the maps and modes made it clear that Treyarch has some good ideas at work here. The large-scale of many of the vehicle maps is a nice change of pace from the tight nature of many Modern Warfare maps, but at the same time if you want brutal infantry combat it's here as well, too. The perk and level systems will encourage long-term play, as you can unlock plenty of fun new toys. The weapons feel oh-so-right, and it's awesome to watch the flamethrower in action. And this was just about head-to-head multiplayer; keep in mind that there's co-op gameplay as well. Put it all together, and it's safe to say that the multiplayer suite may surprise people who aren't expecting much out of World at War.

(For more World at War coverage, check out GameSpy's multiplayer hands-on with footage and details about another new map, Cliffside.)

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