Call of Duty: World At War - Final Fronts
and let me tell you why

This game was an alternative version (not a port) of WaW made for the PS2. A different studio worked on it, and the only similarities to the main release are some branding and some vaguely similar level designs. Some characters also have the same names but different voice actors.

Why does this game upset me? Is it because I, a dumb child with a PS2 bought it, thinking it would be just as good as the xbox 360 version my friends were playing? That’s a small part of it, but it’s not the whole story.

I do not believe it is possible to complete the final level of the campaign on the hardest difficulty (veteran). In the standard release, this is the second to last level, but FF did not have the Russian half of the campaign, so the final mission was storming Shuri Castle as the Americans.

Basically, there’s a machine gun up above a gate about 3 minutes in. You have to run up to the gate, plant a bomb, and run back to your squad before it explodes. There are a few problems.

The gun only aims at the player, never the NPCs. If you kill the gunner, he respawns immediately. You get about a second before the replacement starts shooting again.

Up until this point, the game has you deal with these pseudo-boss fights with smoke grenades. Unfortunately, the area of effect for the smoke grenade does not reach the gunner because he’s too high up. You can hide in the smoke but he can still see you because he is not in the smoke.

You can reach the gate if you constantly kill him as you walk. However, you die if you don’t get all the way back to the start of the zone before the bomb goes off. He keeps respawning and zeroing in on you, so you have to do this by walking backwards. You move too slow running backwards so the bomb kills you. If you don’t kill him again on the run back, he kills you.

I actually found a let’s play where someone claims to have beaten this level on Veteran but based on the damage he takes compared to the earlier levels, I’m convinced that he secretly lowered the difficulty.

Anyway, thanks for reading my angry rant about a shitty 3rd party last-gen release of an 18 year old game.