Call of Duty: WWII

Call of Duty: WWII brought the series back to World War II in 2017, after previous entries had taken place in a near and distant future full of exoskeletons and futuristic weaponry. Sledgehammer Games built the campaign around the story of a US Army squad going through the Normandy landings, the liberation of Europe, and the final battles on German soil, focusing on relationships within the unit as much as on the brutality of the wartime conflict. The return to World War II also brought back a slower, more tactical pace without double jumps or wall-running, and the need to restore health with medkits instead of the automatic regeneration players were used to from the previous, futuristically themed entries.

The game further offers competitive multiplayer with weapons and equipment matching period-accurate armament, the objective-based team mode War, in which one team attacks a series of objectives and the other defends them, and a cooperative zombies mode with its own occult storyline and cast of characters, separate from the main campaign and the classic multiplayer.

On Xbox One, the game is identical in content and technically to the PlayStation 4 version, but without the benefits stemming from Activision's marketing deal with Sony. New seasonal content - additional maps and game modes - thus reached Xbox One with a certain delay after PlayStation 4, as did access to the closed beta before the game's release. On the standard Xbox One as well as on the more powerful Xbox One X, the game ran smoothly, with the One X benefiting from a higher image resolution thanks to its greater power. The core of the game - campaign, multiplayer, and zombies mode - remains the same across platforms, so the main difference between versions is precisely the schedule for releasing additional content, not the content of the game itself. Players on Xbox One thus received a full-fledged, complete experience, just a step behind the competing platform with which Activision had signed an exclusive marketing deal.

Why play it: Due to Activision's marketing deal with Sony, new content arrives on Xbox One with a delay after PlayStation 4, but otherwise it offers the same campaign and multiplayer for fans of World War II FPS games.