➤ RAID: World War II tries Payday in our review! 🎮

There is a successful idea that the market seems to appreciate and support: you take it, change its look and try to resell it to a new niche of players, perhaps changing its setting and hoping that the media tam tam will make the rest. RAID: World War II is neither more nor less than this, an attempt to monetize an old and, now, unoriginal idea, hoping that the console and PC public will be attracted like flies on honey. Dear Starbreeze, we want to tell you with our hearts in hand: the players in 2017 want much more quality. The diatribe between Fortnite and Playerunknown's Battleground has recently brought to the fore the discussion between how ethical or not it is to lean heavily on the ideas of others in an attempt to repeat their success and the videogame history is studded with clones who have tried in vain to gnaw each other users . If on the one hand, however, Epic Games has at least tried to propose a unique and "different" vision of the Battle Royale experience, in RAID we find ourselves essentially reliving a Payday 2 in the past, with the aggravating circumstance of having an old engine on our hands of several years and mechanics largely outdated. Did we really feel the need?

A breezy, at times irreverent cut

The presentation is not even one of the worst so that, in the place of our commander, we find John Cleese who, in the guise of a British intelligence agent, will push the team to attack Nazi Germany in the middle of the war. Our task? destroy stocks, cut off supplies, kill as many bad guys as possible and in the meantime, if the clock allows it, also ransack war zones, taking home the loot. We thus become a sort of Inglourious Basterds, dedicated to killing the Germans in a deliberate manner and the game does not stop our desire for massacre, on the contrary, rewarding indiscriminate extermination. Before entering each mission it is allowed to choose one of the four classes currently available as well as its equipment and then launch us on the online game servers or let the artificial intelligence accompany us in battle. RAID: World War II, of course, is not a title that was born with singleplayer ambitions, on the contrary, it is precisely in the multi and co-op that it manages to give its best, almost coming to have fun if played with friends. Almost, however, is a must because the shortcomings of this title are many and extremely heavy. So let's start with the few missions available, taken as a structure by a thousand other views in recent years. We find ourselves wandering around bare and linear maps trying to reach clear objectives but with little appeal: for example we will have to place some charges in the bunkers or attack the communication stations, but the strategies to do so are always few and limited. There are no big plans to put in place to get around the numerous Nazi guards patrolling the play area and the AI, even on a difficult level, never puts up a fun and stimulating challenge, only becoming more frustrating. than necessary. Our fellow soldiers, in case they are controlled by the CPU, then limit themselves to following the player like puppies, shooting (rarely) the opponents in their line of fire and remaining essentially invisible to the eyes of the enemies, a situation that in a case like this destroys. completely identification. Not to mention the lack of tactical acumen or the impossibility of giving even the most basic commands to the team. If you have to play alone, in short, turn your savings without any hesitation on some other more refined title.

PlayStation 4 Trophies

Getting all the trophies in RAID: World War II is a slow and frustrating task. You will have to prepare to play and replay the same missions an infinite number of times since to reach the coveted platinum it will be essential to have all four protagonists touch the level cap. You will then obviously have to finish all the sparse and missions, a task not easy given the amount of bugs and crashes that await you.

In four there is more taste

It doesn't get much better when three friends, or three random players, take the shotgun in hand and accompany us on a mission. Unfortunately the game engine, the same Diesel of Payday 2 (albeit updated to version 2.0), is now obsolete and weighs a lot on the final result. The entire technical sector of RAID II is at times embarrassing: we are not only talking about the animations, apparently almost a generation ago, but also about the special effects, the feedback of the weapons, the response speed in the commands and even a depth of field that does not go beyond a few meters, sunk by a constant mist essential to maintain a decent framerate. Unfortunately it is a ploy that, at least on PlayStation 4, does not work since the drops are evident and frequent, so much so as to make some sections unplayable. Uploads are also long and unwarranted and there have been cases where crashes and bugs prevented us from completing missions. Now, we know very well that many of these problems could be solved in the future with some patches but here we are not talking about a project sold at a budget price but a game launched at par with a triple A. We would like to stop here and tell you that RAID: World War II also has positive aspects but we cannot do it: the textures and polygonal models are outdated and even all that variety of weapons, attachments and collectibles that ultimately helped Payday become that are missing. media success of a few years ago. In short, playing Raid is frustrating for all this series of reasons and the introductions from the gameplay point of view are so marginal as to leave very little room for analysis. The four classes have unique special abilities to activate in critical situations, such as the ability to see through walls and increase the damage of our fellow soldiers for a short time, but they are so trivial and obvious that they are not worth your attention. Even the interface seems to have been pulled out of a demo quickly assembled, with no particular style, with basic icons lacking any stylistic ambitions. There's a serious lack of weapon balance, with guns serenely killing snipers at sidereal distances, and even Payday 2's heavy feel here fades away, with one of the worst firearms feeling of recent times. An unnecessarily slow progression system closes the package, almost trying to force you to stay on the game servers.

Comment

Tested version PlayStation 4 Price $ 39,99 Resources4Gaming.com

5.0

Readers (4)

4.5

Your vote

RAID: World War II came out with a very specific goal: to continue the successful Payday series and add the flavor of World War II, a choice that could have brought great results. What we found on our hands, on the other hand, is a title with a dubious taste, sunk by technical problems that limit its fun and enjoyment. It's an old game, sold at an outrageously high price for the quality and absolutely not worth your savings. If you enjoyed Payday, keep playing there, the jump to this new series is absolutely not worth the price of the ticket, at least until all the problems and shortcomings are fixed.