Everything works great, but still…
Story let's you play as two different soldiers in two different places: you play as Private Miller fighting against Japanese in the Pacific and take the role of Private Dimitri Petrenko fighting against Nazis in Stalingrad and later on in Berlin. It's all been done before, but at least for once the campaign has a proper ending. Story is told through animated maps, competent voice acting and some real wartime video footage. It all works, but at the same time it feels used and old.
Graphics are great and the frame rate stays solid all the time. Explosions, environments, weather effects and character models are all nicely done. Only facial expressions are a little stiff, but nothing you can't get over with. Color palette is mostly brown and grey, but that's just what people have come to expect from a WWII shooter. Music and sound design in general is also done well. It's filled with small sound effects and when it all comes together it makes you feel like you're in the middle of a big battle. Music fits in nicely and it strengthens the overall epic feel of gameplay.
Gameplay is an epic first person shooter with great controls and extremely intense action. Structure is linear and scripted sequences are many, but it also ensures that there's always something happening as you play. Just like in past games in the series there are infinite numbers of enemies that stop respawning only when you've made progress past an unknown point in the game. This creates an intense movement while bullets are flying everywhere, but in some ways it's also annoying and maybe not so realistic. Campaign is also very short and you can easily beat it in less than 6 hours, but luckily there are reasons to come back to it later on.
Save system uses checkpoints and usually there are plenty of them and this helps to avoid frustration. Bad thing is that most of the time you die because of grenades: you just notice an icon on your screen and then you die. It's not very often when you die in bullets and this multitude of flying grenades was also a problem in Call of Duty 4.
Enemy AI is absolutely terrible: many times enemies just fail to realize that you're shooting after being able to flank them. Your AI controlled teammates don't do much better either: they just stand there, take bullets and shoot. This constantly drags down that epic feel of living battlefield that is performed so well in other aspects.
Nowadays the Call of Duty franchise is known for its multiplayer component. CoD:WaW features co-op campaign for up to four players either locally or through Xbox Live. It's much more fun to play with friends and this is the first time you can do that in a Call of Duty game. I still urge you to first play the campaign alone, because there are some parts in the game that can only be played alone. Finishing a single player game also unlocks an interesting arcade style four player co-op mode called Nazi Zombies. In it you try to stop a neverending horde of Nazi zombies from killing you. It's a funny and interesting feature.
The usual competitive multiplayer is again up to 18 players and new game modes include War from Call of Duty 3 and now the good old Capture the Flag has also returned. Multiplayer is essentially exactly the same as in Call of Duty 4, with some new tweaks and tunings done here and there. This means that you're constantly making progress and gaining experience. There are 65 levels to conquer and after that 10 Prestige levels so it will take hundreds of hours for you to play through them all.
Multiplayer works just fine and even better than it did in Modern Warfare, but you always feel like you've already done this many times over. The single most annoying feature in multiplayer is that you can't choose certain game modes until you've reached a certain level of rank by playing normal Team Deathmatch. After spending 450 hours of playing Domination and Hardcore Team Deathmatch it felt humiliating not to be able to play those modes until the level 14 and 18.
In short it can be said that Call of Duty: World at War is the best WWII first person shooter ever made. Problem is that the game itself is not as good as its big brother Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Still it needs to be said that CoD:WaW is a solid game that has very few flaws in it.