It's actually really impressive just how bad this shit is.

The only really good thing about this game is the improved kinetics of gunplay and movement, but that's really it. It leaves a great first impression because of how fluidly it controls and responds to inputs, but it's one of those things you get used to and stop noticing.

I don't even know where to begin describing what makes this the worst CoD. I guess I'll start with the idiotic design decisions. So, the game coasts on nostalgia HEAVILY, but it does not have a coherent vision for what it's trying to be. The most baffling decision is bringing back the healthbar and first aid kits. CoD2 was the first game in the series to do replenishable health, but that element was integral to CoD's formula. A lot of the flaws of the first game were direct results of lacking this missing piece of a puzzle. When CoD2 came out with the replenishable health, virtually everyone praised it. It completed the CoD identity, which the series stuck to for most of its existence. Bringing back the health bar makes absolutely no sense and shows the creative director's absolute lack of understanding of what made these games successful in the first place. It feels like one of those decisions that are made blindly just to "feel old school" and sell the audience the illusion of retro, when in reality this game does not feel or play at all like the first game.

If the goal was to recreate the experience of the first game, then why do we QTEs that weren't introduced until, I believe, the third game? Why remove the crosshair? To be more realistic? Then why add hit-markers? And how tf is the health bar realistic? These decisions don't make sense together. Furthermore, what's the point of adding first aid kits if you can just ask your teammate to give you one at any point? You can basically heal whenever you want, but now you have to go through this middle-man, and then also press a button and wait for an animation. This is not how the first game worked. You're just making a shittier version of all the following CoDs. You also basically have an infinite ammo, both from another teammate and from boxes you can find scattered through the level.

And if the goal was realism, then why do we have Nazis carrying PPSh-41's (a Soviet gun) in Normandy and double-barrelled shotguns? Or this mechanic where you can help your wounded comrades by dragging them like a meter away from their position and leaving them there to bleed out? There's a scripted sequence where you're carrying your wounded friend and fighting off Nazis with a pistol, and the game literally tells you "press 6 to heal", and you can heal yourself in the process while your hands are supposedly busy dragging your friend, who is wounded but cannot heal himself the way you can, and you also cannot heal him. Just the ludo-narrative dissonance and the complete ignorance of it on the developers' part is staggering.

The level design is absolutely atrocious. It alternates between linear corridors with hordes of enemies or the equivalents of the Favela level in MW2 where you have enemies shooting at you from all directions and there's practically no structure to the layout or how opposing forces progress through the level and confront each other. And the amount of enemies is just ridiculous.

The old Call of Duty games alternated between quieter, stealth(-ish) missions and bombastic battles with lots of explosions. I played four missions of this game, and all four were just non-stop bombastic battles. But it's actually exacerbated by the fact that the game lacks any notion of creativity. Old CoD games built their reputation on presenting cool scenarios, often lifted directly from movies, but sometimes not. I'm talking about that mission in CoD1 where you're given only bullets and told to rush a hill, or that nuclear explosion in CoD4, nearly the entirety of World at War and Black Ops, even the horrendous MW2 constantly gave you something cool to look at and partake in. Most of what you do in CoD: WWII is just shoot Nazis and blow up their infrastructure, that's really it.

And I guess the game thinks it's Band of Brothers or something because it forces this generic Hollywod sob-story on you, but I could not give less of a fuck about it. I welcome a good story, but you didn't have to give us one. The first three games had practically no story. 4 and 5's stories were rather minimal (yet still had more memorably and likeable characters). This game thinks it has a fucking Shakespearean masterpiece of a story, but it's really a boring piece of shit.

And I've already talked about the lack of creativity in scenarios, but that same lack of creativity extends to the mechanical variety. Most of the actual gameplay consists of holding down positions, breaking through to a position or sniping. Just an absolute borefest.

And what makes this extra bad is that all this crap weighs 130 GB! I don't think I've ever had a game this large on my computer. And it would be fine if this was the greatest game of all time or at least tried to push boundaries in some way. I remember how Doom 3 came on three CDs and that was impressive to me at the time, and Doom 3, say what you want about that game, was doing something innovative. You can say what you want about Rage, but that game was also trying out new technologies, so it also weighed a lot for its era. This piece of shit here is the most generic, boring game you could imagine. If you've ever played a Call of Duty game, you've already played a better version of everything this game has to offer.

This game should never have been made.