Call of Duty: World at War
Intense overall intensityWhat's in it
Sustained realistic WWII firefights against human soldiers with heavy blood spray, and explosions and flamethrowers that tear enemies apart.
The story depicts wartime atrocities in graphic detail — prisoners executed, soldiers burned alive, and the brutal, vengeful violence of the Eastern and Pacific fronts.
Soldiers use strong profanity including 'fuck' throughout scripted combat dialogue.
The Nazi Zombies mode hunts the player through dark, enclosed maps with waves of undead enemies and sudden attacks.
The American campaign opens with a captured Marine being tortured and killed by enemy soldiers, shown on screen.
Charred, burned, and dismembered bodies are shown as lingering imagery beyond the moment of combat.
Enemy attack dogs charge the player in both the campaign and multiplayer and are shot or knifed like any other enemy, and the Nazi Zombies mode has rounds of undead dogs that the player kills.
Who can reach your kid
What it is
Call of Duty: World at War is a first-person shooter set in the Pacific and Eastern-front battles of World War II, played across American and Soviet soldier campaigns. Combat is realistic and bloody, using period firearms, grenades, and flamethrowers against human enemies; explosions and fire can dismember bodies, and the game lingers on charred and mutilated corpses. The tone is among the darkest in the series, depicting executions, burning of wounded soldiers, and battlefield atrocities, with strong profanity in the script. A separate cooperative Nazi Zombies mode pits players against relentless waves of the undead. Online multiplayer supports open voice and text chat with strangers and community-made custom maps, though official online play is unreliable on current copies.
How it's framed
The game frames its violence through the lens of grim, unromanticized total war, presenting brutality and atrocity as the reality soldiers on both sides carried out rather than as spectacle to celebrate. Enemies are enemy combatants, and killing is the core objective, rewarded through combat progression and killstreaks; the darkest acts, such as burning the wounded, are presented as part of the war's cruelty rather than glorified.
Details
- Developer
- Treyarch
- Publisher
- Activision
- Released
- Nov 18, 2008
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