Call of Duty - World at War - Final Fronts

The subtitle is the honest part. While Treyarch's World at War was tearing up Peleliu and Berlin on the newer hardware in 2008, Rebellion was building a different game entirely for the PlayStation 2, sharing a name, a war and a publisher with the big release but almost nothing else. Different missions, different engine, different structure. Calling it a port would be wrong, and calling it the same game would be worse.

What Rebellion built is a compact set of campaigns running in parallel: Marines working through the Pacific, American forces pushing toward the Rhine, and a British thread that gives the thing a bit of variety it badly needs. Levels are short and corridor-tight, built around the PS2's limits rather than fighting them. Enemy counts are modest, sightlines are controlled, and the scripted set pieces are small-scale by the standards of what Call of Duty had already become. The flamethrower shows up, as does a stint in a tank, but these are gestures toward the headline game rather than their own ideas.

It holds together better than the usual last-generation obligation release. The shooting has weight, the checkpointing is fair, and Rebellion understood that a PS2 war shooter needed to funnel you rather than open up. What it cannot do is hide the absences. There is no cooperative play, and no Nazi Zombies, which is the mode everyone actually remembers World at War for. Anyone who came to this version expecting that is going to feel the gap immediately.

The presentation is where the hardware shows most plainly. Textures are flat, animation is stiff, and the squadmates have a habit of standing in doorways and firing into geometry. Audio fares better, with voice work and weapon sound that do a lot of the heavy lifting for atmosphere. Draw distance in the jungle sections is short enough to double as cover, which is either good design or a happy accident, depending on how generous you feel.

Final Fronts belongs to a strange category: the shadow Call of Duty, built for the enormous installed base that had not yet moved on. Treated as its own modest shooter, it is five or six solid hours. Treated as a substitute for the game it is named after, it will disappoint anyone who knows what they are missing. The PS2 got a war, just not the one the posters were selling.