Call of Duty: WWII

Call of Duty: WWII marked the series' return to its roots in 2017. After a string of entries set in the near and distant future, with exoskeletons and laser weapons, developer Sledgehammer Games returned to World War II and to the raw ground combat of infantry without futuristic gadgets. The campaign follows a squad of the American army from the landing in Normandy through the liberation of Europe to the final push into German territory, and emphasizes camaraderie within the squad as well as the harshness and hopelessness of the battlefield. Narratively, the game returns to the linear, cinematic approach to the campaign that players were used to from older entries in the series, and for the first time in years forces players to manage their health using health kits instead of automatic health regeneration.

Besides the story campaign, the game offers a classic competitive multiplayer with a set of traditional weapons and perks matching period equipment, the team-based War mode with asymmetric objectives on both sides of the map, where one side attacks and the other defends key points, and the cooperative Nazi Zombies mode, which takes players into a dark alternate storyline about occult Nazi experiments with its own set of characters and story cutscenes.

The PlayStation 4 version benefited from a long-term marketing partnership between Activision and Sony, thanks to which players on this platform received new seasonal content - maps, game modes, and other add-ons - earlier than users on Xbox One or PC. Likewise, the closed beta version of the game before release was, for a period, exclusively available on PlayStation 4. Technically, the game ran stably on both the base PS4 and the more powerful PS4 Pro, with the Pro version offering slightly higher image resolution. Content-wise it's the same game as on other consoles; the difference thus lies mainly in the timing of additional content and in platform-related details such as trophies instead of achievements.

Why play it: For fans of the series, the PS4 version is interesting thanks to earlier access to seasonal content and the exclusive closed beta, while on PS4 Pro the game runs stably and at a somewhat higher resolution.