Pierson, as mentioned, is an interesting exception. Throughout the game, I honestly didn’t really care whether they lived or died. It’s hard to emotionally care for any of Red’s teammates, simply because you barely know anything meaningful or deep about them.

However, that still doesn’t make up for the by-now overused Band of Brothers-esque plot in this Call of Duty game. His friction with the squad’s Commanding Officer, Turner, adds an interesting wrinkle in an otherwise cookie cutter plot. It’s not revealed what that was until near the end of the game, but the hook was intriguing enough to make Pierson the most interesting character in the game. Pierson’s a former officer who was demoted to a sergeant due to a major incident in the past. Perhaps that’s why the game mostly relegates them to being secondary characters and instead focuses on Sergeant Pierson, played by Josh Duhamel. The characters in Red’s squad aren’t really fleshed out and felt like specific archetypes rather than ones you can grow to empathize and like. However, while the focus on the more personal aspect of war is very welcome, I thought it could have been handled a lot better.

Though the game places Red in some of the war’s most famous battles, including D-Day, the Liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge, the focus is more on his squad rather than the over-arching European warfare. WWII’s devotion to telling a story means there’s much more focus on Red and his squad mates than on the overall war effort. That said, the latest WWII game has no tie-in to that game.

If the name sounds familiar, that’s because the unit was also featured in its very own Call of Duty game also called The Big Red One, that came out exclusively only for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube. In Call of Duty: WWII, you play as Ronald ‘Red’ Daniels, a soldier in America’s 1 st Infantry Division, also known as The Big Red One. As one who has played Call of Duty 2 during the Xbox 360 days, it’s certainly amazing to see how far the series has come since. After forays into modern and future warfare, the franchise is once more dipping its toes into the battles of World War II. Call of Duty finally rounded the corner and is back to where the series started.

Call of duty world war 2 reviews