I got Black Ops Cold War for Christmas 2020.
While I had lots of fun with the zombies (yes that’s all I played), it felt so different from the old entries like Black Ops 2. The difference was so drastic that I felt compelled to go back to where the zombies mode started which I had never played: World at War.
My older brother had a PS3 and all the old COD games in my parents’ basement from when he was a teen. I figured I might as well try World at War zombies on there first. But since it was the PS3 version offline, I was forced to play the campaign in order to unlock zombies.
And the campaign just blew me away.
Up until this point, I had never played a COD campaign, and I wasn’t nearly as into story-based games. COD: World at War’s campaign single-handedly made me do a 180. It fundamentally changed how I viewed gaming as a whole. Both the American and Russian campaigns gripped me the entire runtime. The cutscenes felt like I was in a WWII museum with all of its real historical footage. And the final 2 missions were by far had the most powerful moments in the game. Its gritty and hopeless take on WWII will always stay with me.
And then I unlocked the zombies and had so much fun with it. Even with just one barebones map, the gameplay felt extremely good. And unlike Cold War, it actually felt like you were… well… surviving!
These days, I mostly play it on Steam which comes with all the zombies maps for free. Shi no Numa is easily my favorite of the 4. But those maps combined with its masterpiece of a campaign make World at War my favorite game of all time.