While some of my friends have gone back to Call of Duty 4 most of them are still playing Call of Duty: World at War, so I know that they’ll be thirsty for new content. Thankfully Treyarch are asking for more money bowing to the community’s wishes by bringing four new levels to the game in the form of a map pack (The Call of Duty 4 map pack, incidentally, is the first time I ever bought something over Xbox Live). Three of the levels will be straight out multiplayer levels, while the fourth will be an additional level for the popular “Nazi zombie” co-op mode.

“Nightfire” will take place on the streets of a burning Berlin, while “Station” takes place in an underground train station (which sounds like it’s taken from the level where the Germans flood the subways). “Knee Deep” is a new Pacific level, taking place on the island of Peleliu in a Japanese command centre. Finally, the zombie level is “Verrückt”;

“The fan favorite 4-player co-op Nazi Zombies Bonus Mode returns with “Verrückt,” a terrifying Zombie asylum featuring more weapons, perks via the addition of Perks-a-Cola machines, electroshock defenses and the endless zombie horde.” - Official COD website.

The map pack will arrive in March, coming for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. Hopefully I’ll have the monitor I use to play my 360 in HD back by then (the power button got stuck so it’s being fixed, though it seems to be taking forever), and I can join in with the new zombie fun along with everyone else.

There’s no word on pricing as of yet.

I’ll be posting my impressions of Call of Duty: World at War when I’ve had enough playtime with it, but until then I have one major gripe with the game that I want to talk about.

I don’t have much money at the moment (plus, with it being close to Christmas there’s no real point in splashing out on loads of games) so I have to be very careful when it comes to choosing which game I want to buy. While there are games that I would rather buy over the new Call of Duty (like Fallout 3 or Fable 2), I had to have my brother in mind when buying a new game since I haven’t bought a multiplayer game (well, one that includes offline multiplayer anyway) since Gears of War (I only bought this back in the summer, so it’s not as long ago as you think). We wanted a game where you could play split-screen co-op throughout the same campaign as the singleplayer one, and the new Call of Duty provides that. Unfortunately you can’t play split-screen online multiplayer like you can with Halo 3, but I can live with that.

Anyway, we loaded up the co-op campaign, ready to fight the Axis forces, and we were both immediately disappointed with what we saw. For some strange reason Treyarch have decided to only use a tiny amount of the screen for spilt-screen co-op. So, instead of a simple vertical or horizontal split you have two tiny boxes in the middle of a dull background placeholder. Why oh why would anyone choose to do this? The Call of Duty series is supposed to be cinematic, but this means nothing if you can’t see anything that’s going on. You literally have to sit incredibly close to the screen just to aim at somebody. We were playing Left 4 Dead the other day and that manages to make use of the full screen when playing split-screen co-op, so why can’t COD:WaW do the same? It just takes a lot of the fun out of the co-op experience.

Apart from that I am enjoying the game, but those impressions will have to wait until I’ve played more of it.