What Is It Good For?
Call of Duty: WWII expands on the series' many multiplayer offerings with a brand new, highly involved game mode: "War." An objective-based team battle, War combines all the best parts of Call of Duty's other objective-based game modes to make lengthy battles in which one team attacks and tries to complete a series of tasks, and another team defends, doing everything they can to stop them.
War changes the Call of Duty multiplayer formula in some key ways, requiring players to know the maps to access every advantage for defending and attacking. Not everything about War is obvious--so here are 10 tips to help you achieve victory over your enemies on all of Call of Duty: WWII’s War maps. If you're looking for more general multiplayer tips, you can check out our Call of Duty: WWII multiplayer beginner's guide.
Call of Duty: WWII is out now for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. For our thoughts about the game, check out our Call of Duty: WWII review. You can also see what other critics are saying about the WWII shooter in our review roundup. And For more on Sledgehammer's huge title, check out our guide on how to get the Tesla Gun in Zombies Mode or take a look at the quest that rewards you for watching other players open loot boxes.
Create Multiple Useful Loadouts
The thing that makes War interesting is that the battlefield is constantly changing. As attackers clear objectives, defenders are pushed back repeatedly to new areas, where they have to change up their strategies. You can pick a single loadout for an entire mission, but as the situation changes, you'll often want to be able to switch your approach and your weapons to go with it.
In general, you should have a good mid-range loadout (probably Infantry), a close-range loadout (Exploratory or Airborne) and a long-range loadout (Mountain) so you can play multiple roles in the battle. If your team is getting wrecked by a machine gun emplacement, for instance, switching to a sniper can help clear the way. If you have to fight in close quarters, a shotgun can do some serious damage. Play a few rounds and build loadouts to help you deal with the objectives you're struggling with.
It's All About Teamwork
Running around as a lone wolf is a great way to lose when you're playing War. The only real way to complete your objectives is to work together, and the team that operates as the best unit is the one that will prevail. Not only do you want to stick together with your teammates whenever possible, but you want to assist them as much as you can. That means laying down covering fire when teammates are building defenses, flanking enemies when they're already engaged in firefights, and generally doing everything you can to work like a team.
War is a game mode in which communication is also key. You should listen for your teammates' characters to call out enemy locations--they'll do that automatically as part of the game--but grabbing a voice headset so you can speak with your squad directly is recommended. That way you can share enemy locations and coordinate strategies. It's the best way to guarantee victories.
Bring Smoke Grenades
You can get away with playing most of Call of Duty: WWII's multiplayer without ever touching a smoke grenade, but in War, it's an essential tool. Buy it as soon as you can unlock it and add it to at least one of your loadouts--specifically, whichever one you plan to use to charge up the beach at Normandy in the Operation Neptune map. Smoke can obscure enemy vision significantly, allowing you to avoid getting shot up by machine gun nests or sniped at key moments, like on that Normandy beach.
When putting together a War team, make sure everyone has smoke available for those times when you’re assaulting enemy defenses. You can always tell a new team by a group that has no smoke grenades and thus gets chewed up by the enemy at key points on a map.
Build Your Defenses
When you're playing the defensive side of a War map, there are lots of ways to close off paths to the enemy and force them to stop, potentially making them vulnerable and giving you time to set up. The trouble is, while maps are full of buildable walls, machine gun nests and tank-stopping hedgehogs, somebody has to build them. Every time you're pushed back on a War map as a defender, you're entering a new area where the defenses are not yet set up.
Keeping your defenses up is essential to winning a map. Attacking players can knock down walls and barricades you've built, but you can reconstruct them (and you earn points for doing so). Protect your defenses and make sure you get the most out of them by using them to do things like ambush players and blast unsuspecting attackers before they're ready for the fight. A team that gets lazy about its defenses usually gets overwhelmed.
Blow Stuff Up
The flip side of the discussion about defenses is that, for attackers, you constantly want to be blowing up barricades and other irritations even if you don't plan to take those paths. There are actually multiple ways into every defended area on a given War map, but defenders usually block them off. To destroy those barricades, you can plant explosives just by getting close and holding down the corresponding button, although this leaves you vulnerable.
It's almost always worth destroying barricades, however. Opening up multiple paths to get into an area means you can make it hard for the defenders to anticipate your attacks. You can also blow some stuff up when playing on defense--on Operation Neptune, for instance, it's possible to destroy Allied ladders up into the bunkers. Whenever possible, using your demolitions abilities is key.
Grab The Flamethrower
Unlike other Call of Duty: WW2 modes, there are no scorestreaks in War. That means even if you're wrecking the other team and racking up objective points, you're not going to trigger your usual bonuses like air support. But there is one handy boost you can snag in the game if you're quick about it: a flamethrower.
Flamethrowers float onto the battlefield in plane-dropped care packages, and they're pretty handy if you can grab them and use them correctly. Having the gun doesn't make you any more difficult to kill, but it does make you extremely lethal--it doesn't take much to kill an enemy with the flamethrower. Better still, you get to keep the flamethrower until it's empty, even if you're killed. Use it in tight areas and at clutch moments to kill lots of other players really quickly, and you might save yourself a loss. Just make sure not to ignore the flamethrower when it drops, or the other team can grab it.
Mounted Machine Guns Are Essential
Mounted 50-caliber machine gun nests are all over the place in the Call of Duty: WW2 campaign, but you'll find them scattered liberally around multiplayer maps as well. In War, they're extremely important, and whenever you can construct and use one==both on attack and defense--you should.
In lots of situations in War, you'll need space to complete objectives. When constructing a bridge or holding down the beach at Normandy, stopping players from being able to group up is essential. Mounted machine guns leave you exposed, but they’re extremely powerful. If you use them effectively, you can control the ground the other team needs to cover and keep them from achieving their goals.
Don't Worry About Dying
War isn't about getting kills, it's about completing objectives. You do want to be as lethal as possible and survive as much as you can in the game mode, but those aren't your primary motivators they way they are in a mode like Team Deathmatch. Sometimes, it's worth dying to help your team win.
That means you shouldn't be afraid to throw yourself on a proverbial grenade if it comes to that. Risking your life to complete objectives is more important than staying alive. You'll often see teams full of sharpshooters, all staying back so they can pick off enemy players--and those kinds of teams lose. Choose your loadouts and your role based on what can help your team be victorious, and don't be afraid to charge into certain death if the distraction might help the cause. After all, you'll always come right back.
Explore The Maps
There's a lot going on in any given War match. Each map has at least three objectives, all of which could be a self-contained multiplayer map unto themselves. And all those objectives have multiple ways of entering and achieving them. There are lots of paths through the map, many of which can be blocked and defended, and elements like machine gun nests that can be set up by both teams. The point is, there are a lot of ins and outs to learn.
It can take a bit to get familiar with the maps in War, but spend some time exploring them, even in the midst of battle. Finding all the paths through an area will make you better able to defend them, and better able to switch your tactics to deal with being stagnated by enemy defenses. Finding the right place to wait for enemy attackers can be key to fighting off the final assault in the last moments of a match. Try to get familiar with all the objectives in a map as quickly as possible.
Anticipate The Enemy--And Camp To Catch Them
Once you know the maps well enough to know where the other team will approach you from and where they're likely to hole up, you can use a tactic that is otherwise frowned-upon in multiplayer: camping. When defending, camping isn't just a possible tactic, it's often essential. You'll often need to sit on an objective and keep players from approaching it. The best way to do that is find a good spot to hang out and catch players unawares.
There are tons of good spots where you can hang out and catch players as they climb up ladders, pop through doorways or try to blow up barricades. The best way to find those spots is when you're attacking; keep an eye out for places where your teammates don't expect a fight, and then use that information to slow up the other team. You can also find good places to camp as an attacker, too, which is especially useful when you're trying to set bombs on objectives. Get used to looking for out-of-the-way corners and use them to your advantage. War is about winning by any means necessary.
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