From the moment Call Of Duty: World At War was formally announced, the game’s creators had a new conflict on their hands. Treyarch’s newest enemies were the massed ranks of COD4 fanboys, and their message board assaults took two basic forms. Firstly: ‘WTF have they gone back to WWII, again?’ and then: ‘WTF should we care about a Treyarch production when Infinity Ward’s work on the franchise is the bestest?’

The fanboys might not want to hear it, but World At War has plainly been built with both these questions very much in mind. “Some of our guys have been working on World War II games for longer than World War II lasted,” confesses Treyarch creative director Richard Farrelly at the game’s European unveiling. So Treyarch knows, even more than most gamers, how deeply fatigue set in with the endless stream of post-Medal Of Honor titles based on the conflict. World At War is WWII via Modern Warfare, with Treyarch having not only used Infinity Ward’s COD4 engine for the new game, but also taking pains to implement the wider lessons of its huge success.

Specifically, the team has taken note of how COD4’s polish and intensity enabled it to wow both casual console owners and hardcore FPS fans harboring doubts about its depth. Rather than promise that World At War’s singleplayer mode will last longer than Modern Warfare’s, the developer simply insists that any levels or sections that aren’t good enough will be dumped rather than kept in as padding.

Rather than revert to the multiple-bullet kills and spindly bayonets, Treyarch has assembled a WWII weapon-set intended to give the player the same sense of power that COD4’s 21st-century arsenal does – the likely star a flamethrower designed to destroy not only Japanese guerrillas, but also the jungles. In place of muddy trenches and barren battlefields, the new environments ooze cinematic sheen and atmosphere.

The one area in which World At War can effortlessly and indisputably claim superiority over Modern Warfare is in geographical and historical authenticity. Treyarch has rifled through technical blueprints, built life-size vehicle models to ensure in-game accuracy and consistent scale, and indulged in obsessive and painstaking audio recordings of period weaponry. Indeed, the biggest obstacle to COD4-sized success might be its admirable aim of creating a new WWII game that doesn’t retread the same old battlefields, and instead focuses on lesser-known fronts. It’s difficult to square the notion of the ‘definitive’ WWII experience with a title that appears confined to one big city and a few islands.

World At War will extend and evolve COD4’s perks system and offer multiplayer maps informed by the focus and success of its predecessor’s, while vehicles and on- and offline co-op modes are the most obvious additions. It will feature splitscreen, multi-monitor and online co-op modes for up to four players. Some singleplayer sequences will be omitted from co-op, such as an air-and-sea battle with mounted guns, in which the strategic point of the level is to switch between four guns during an attack. With four human gunners, it just wouldn’t be quite