Published 08/10/2025

Call of Duty: World at War - Final Fronts

These days, Call of Duty represents a pretty unified product. No matter what console you’re playing it on, you’re generally playing the same game as all the other platforms. Gone are the days of the weird DS side-games, or the downgraded Wii ports, just the core main series that’s become gaming’s biggest juggernaut.

But back in the 2000s, Call of Duty, along with the new-exploding FPS genre, was a wild west in the PS2 era, and a microcosm of how gaming handled its ‘big’ franchises. Call of Duty 1 and 2 couldn’t work for that era of consoles, so we got Finest Hour and Big Red One, serviceable, but very different, pseudo-’demake’ experiences tailored for a console whilst avoiding the label of being actually called a demake’. But then, Activision pivoted; instead of realising it on the home of the FPS, the PC, Call of Duty 3 was exclusively made for console, and going forward, it seemed Call of Duty would present a unified vision between console and PC. And it did for the universally acclaimed Modern Warfare, which was only released on ‘modern’ hardware.

But for some reason, it was here Activision decided to tweak their strategy.

Going Back For Seconds

On the same day as Call of Duty’s most acclaimed release, World at War, arrived on PC and the seventh generation of consoles, another title was released. Unable to resist the urge of even more sales, regardless of quality Activision gave us solely on the PS2 the confusingly titled Call of Duty: World At War - Final Fronts. With Treyarch going all-in on World at War’s flagship release, Activision tasked all-rounder developers Rebellion Developments with producing a World At War in-name-only, solely for the PS2. That game, the likely purposefully confusing titled Call of Duty: World At War - Final Fronts, has all the signs of being developed as quickly and cheaply as possible to keep a revenue stream from gaming’s biggest platform, whilst also likely suckering in those hoping to get the biggest Call of Duty yet on the cheap.

I really, really feel for those people who quickly realised they were getting a game that was much uglier, much shorter, much less interesting, and more horrifically - completely lacking the true World at War’s most acclaimed feature - Nazi Zombies.

But let’s break it down - what makes up World at War: Final Fronts - and why is it one of the most forgotten, and frequently reviled entries in the series?

Well, as compared to the largely new experiences that were provided in Finest Hour and Big Red One, whilst much of Final Fronts is new content, it does really feel like a demake of the core experience. As opposed to other FPS of the day, Final Fronts lacks any kind of multiplayer, along with the wildly addictive Nazi Zombie mode that took gamers by storm. The total content of the racks up to a thirteen mission campaign that easily ranks amongst Call of Duty’s worst. It’s short - taking only a handful of hours to complete - much of which feels like aped content from the much more complete package of the ‘next-gen’ version. Considering a third of the game is literally alternate, much worse versions of the Pacific Front segments from World at War proper, it’s hard to feel like Final Fronts is anything but ‘the World at War we have at home.’

Blurry, Hazy, Jaggy History

The second you enter the first level, hell, even the tutorial, it becomes clear things are very wrong. Without even being in the true World at War into the conversation, Final Fronts looks significantly worse than the previous PS2 console entry in the series, Call of Duty 3, an issue that grows more disturbing once you realise this game came out at the tail end of 2008, where some of the most beautiful PS2 games were coming out. Textures are ridiculously blurry and undefined, with rough character models for both your ride-or-die buddies and the endless hordes you’ll be cutting through. It’s a genuinely horrendous looking game, with almost no real definition nor variation across its locales; it’s almost always ‘Japanese-occupied jungle’ or ‘snowy, German-held city’. You can count the pixels of the sky above you, and the visuals of the cover you’ll frequently be hiding behind don’t match their hitboxes - spraying a full clip of ammo into an enemy who was CLEARLY peeking over the edge of cover to no effect never, ever feels good. It’s a game that is very, very clearly made on a budget and a tiny timescale, as whilst everything functions, very little functions particularly well.

I think one thing I want to lay down is that as a baseline, I don’t think Final Fronts is an atrocious FPS. It functions, it provides a mostly consistent experience and is perfectly playable. It’s just when you take it in the context that this game proceeds three okay-to-great shooters, and exists as a cash-grab to give PS2 players *something* alongside the next-gen World at War that makes this such a depressing package of a game. Honestly, I’m just also confused why World at War got the last-gen treatment, but Modern Warfare didn’t? Maybe they were sure how crazy Modern Warfare’s sales were, and wished they’d had a piece of that pie for the PS2? That's all I can think of. Either way, it was clear that the game received an extremely small amount of time for development - the lack of any multiplayer, local or otherwise underlines that more then anything.

Outside of Finest Hour’s inaccurate, janky gunplay, I’ve generally praised how the shooting feels in these titles. Final Fronts feels like an awkward middle-ground. It’s nowhere near as inaccurate as Finest Hour’s, and it might even be as accurate as seen in the later PS2 titles, but there’s a complete lack of sauce behind them. There’s no kick behind them, no sense of impact when you take down foes - hell, using the flamethrower, the single most devastating weapon in the game, and you just feel… nothing? There’s something really, really wrong there. In fact, the lack of impact applies to the enemy guns, too - we’ll get into the game’s very low level of difficulty in a sec, but in the rare times that I actually got gunned down, I almost had no idea I was being shot at all. But it does all… function. It’s the bare minimum you could expect from a game, but when you’ve had several decent games directly precede them, where does it feels way better? It just doesn’t cut it. Overall, the gunplay works. It’s just every other element in that game that tugs it down from the vaunted realms of mediocrity.

This lack of reactivity and ‘feel’ behind the gunplay doesn’t really matter, as Final Front’s foes provide some of the worst combatants I’ve ever seen in an FPS. Whilst the modern version presents perhaps the most difficult title in the series, it’s PS2 outing presents almost the exact opposite. You can stand outside of cover and survive a pretty decent amount of time, simply because the AI either spends far too much time just missing all their shots, or just ignoring you outright. The vast, vast majority of my deaths came from grenades that frequently just spawn into existence at scripted moments in the game, and coupling the short amount of time you have to throw it back, and how awkward it actually is to throw it back… well, that says it all, really. To really underline how poorly the AI’s attempts to stop my various motley crews from achieving our goals is that I played this entire game on Veteran, and there is something incredibly poetic and hilarious about the fact that whilst the core World at War featured maybe the hardest Veteran difficulty in the series, Final Fronts firmly presents us with the easiest.

Jack Of No Trades

The game’s contents feels like a half-frankenstein at times; rather than the acclaimed dual storylines of the next-gen version that featured the war in the Pacific against the Japanese, and the Eastern Front of Europe, Final Fronts borrows some elements. Around a third of the stages follow the same Pacific crew from the next-gen version, Sgt. Roebuck and his unit, whilst the game also tackles the exploits of the British and Americans in the Western Front in Europe. The Pacific sections are the most befuddling, as some scenarios are ripped directly from the next-gen versions, but none of the heart of what made these levels so brutal are here. The tutorial teases at a somewhat more introspective story, as you’re given an inner monologue to follow - the phrase “We thought we’d win the war on our own… we were wrong” being quite chilling as the tutorial ends - but it really doesn’t go anywhere and just lets down the lack of impact the game has as a whole.

The next-gen version of World at War presents both the Pacific and Eastern fronts as the very worst of war, of humanity. Of how prolonged conflict grinds and cuts away at who one is as a person. Of how war truly is hell. There are smidges of it, here and there, but rather than the galling and sombering depiction of warfare from the next-gen - hell, or even Finest Hour, a game from half a decade earlier - it just feels war by the numbers. Move up. Shoot those faceless germans. Make some benign comments about war being hell. There’s no foundation to the game’s atmosphere - it’s war for the sake of the game, with no narrative to speak of. To continue the Frankenstein metaphor, one of the few elements that bled over well enough from the next-gen version’s amazing atmosphere to Final Fronts is the music. And that’s simply because they’ve just directly ported the music over - it’s seriously just the exact same soundtrack, transplanted into moments they were never scored for, and just existing in shorter loops and lower quality. It is a very good soundtrack, though, if I’m being really fair.

When it comes to the act of actually playing through these levels, Final Fronts fares no better than its haphazard scenarios. The majority of levels are generally fairly boring; not only are many of them on the short side, but they pretty much consist of a rather narrow corridor-like space. You are just always moving forward, forward, forward - there is no real way to flank your foes, no alternate paths, no vantage spots the game doesn’t force you to; like the act of warfare itself, it is just an eternal trudge forward. It makes the game a chore to play - there’s no real variation in tasks beside ‘move forward’ or ‘defend this point for a few minutes’, and there’s no moment where these repetitive objectives become engaging because of just how easy it is to deal with the enemy AI.

The only levels I actually enjoyed were a couple of the British missions around the midpoint of the game; in one, you’re doing a lot of sniping and faux-stealth stuff to sell the infiltration of the German-held location. It’s basic, but it works well enough. The second is a much smaller level, where the bulk of it is spent in a central location, a church graveyard, desperately holding out against overwhelming odds as Germans flood in from every direction. They would never rate as amongst my favourite levels in a CoD game, or even in the PS2 quartet of titles, but they stand out in inferior company as generally an all right time. But again, I’m really biased towards ‘base under siege’ scenarios in general, so your mileage may vary.

Hell, the only level in this entire game that presented any kind of alternate gameplay beyond just straight gunplay was still half-assed. Every Call of Duty, almost without exception, NEEDS some kind of tank or vehicle section, and whilst you certainly do get your mandated tank level… you don’t really get to even drive the tank. It’s essentially an on-rails shooter level, the kind of on-rails that feels almost impossible to lose as long as you put even a modicum of effort into fighting back. It’s arguably the most boring level in the entire game, and I genuinely think the game would be better without it, even if that meant there was no vehicle segment whatsoever. Coupling this with how linear and barebones the rest of the game is, it feels so tacked on to be nearly insulting. If it was a sequence where you control weaponry in an airborne vehicle, that’s one thing, I don’t think Call of Duty ever had controllable air sequences to this point, so having an on-rails segment of this kind wouldn’t be as frustrating to deal with.

It’s understandable for Activision to want to give gaming’s largest subset something to chomp on, but Call of Duty: World at War - Final Fronts is not something anyone should have to settle for. Serviceable gunplay and linear, mediocre missions don’t make up for how forgettable this game is, the amount of concessions made in creating a PS2 version of World at War but only in name. The fact that the game is maybe the shortest campaign in the series - cut down even more so by the laughably low difficulty exacerbated by the poor AI, and it leaves me really unable to recommend this to really anyone but the most hardcore of Call of Duty fans. Back in 2008, if you solely had a PS2, maybe there’d be a place for Final Fronts in your collection (maybe at a deep discount), but today? It’s nothing more than an oddity and curiosity, a bygone example of a company wanting that extra slice of the pie, but doing little to work for it.