WW2 games – the best World War II shooters, strategy games and beyond

Video games and World War II. An odd couple — one an entertainment medium, the other one of the most harrowing periods in world history — but one that endures. The conflict is unique in that its fictionalization began as it was still taking place. The movies of the early 1940s portrayed heroic deeds in a war that didn’t bear much resemblance to the horrific reality, and as the 20th century continued, so did the tradition of World War II in a fictionalized setting.

When we play games set during WW2, you could argue we’re actually revisiting the silver-screen version, albeit in interactive form. Nearly every shooter seems to tip its hat to Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers or Enemy at the Gates along its way to the credits screen.

What we’ve assembled below is a list of different perspectives on the conflict as we’ve seen it in movies and TV in the intervening decades. Perspectives that place you in the boots of an infantryman, a general, or more often than not, an incredibly tough supersoldier capable of turning the tide — if not wrapping the whole thing up — —singlehandedly.

Medal of Honor

We’re starting this list by paying our dues. 1999’s Medal of Honor came about after Steven Spielberg watched his son playing GoldenEye on his N64. With World War 2 firmly in the director’s head during the production of Saving Private Ryan, he set his Dreamworks Interactive Studio the task of creating one of those newfangled first-person shooters set in the conflict, and in doing so laid a template for the subgenre for decades to come.

With a score by Academy Award-winning composer Michael Giacchino and consultation from Saving Private Ryan military advisor Dale Dye, it’s a staunchly cinematic slant on the war, and that’s important. The bombast and set-pieces throughout its campaign aren’t just exhilarating for the player, they also make clear the distinction between the fictionalized war we know from the big screen, and the real events we wisely keep at a respectful distance. As for its legacy, if you ever wondered why you seemed to spend 1999 to 2005 landing on various occupied beaches in shooters, look no further. Not the most immersive or playable of the list today, Medal of Honor nonetheless deserves its mention for creating a template for interactive war experiences.

Company of Heroes

Relic’s take on the traditional RTS ditches the vast numbers of units and resource management operations so that you can focus on a small group of potent but fragile soldiers. The settings are vast and frenetic so there’s still that key sense of a wider scale battle, but in Company of Heroes you’re micromanaging units so closely that you feel both ownership over your victories and horrible cold-sweat accountability for your losses.

The simplicity of taking capture points to increase your manpower gives a sense of pace to battles that’s often missing in military strategy, and some ebb and flow rather than a slow but inevitable creep across the map. Its cutscenes are serviceable as tone setters, but like the very best RTS games, it tells a compelling story through the missions themselves.

Hell Let Loose

There’s something unnerving about the sparse UI of Hell Let Loose. Funny as it may sound, small touches like that go a long way towards creating a sense of futility and vulnerability. Not that you don’t already feel pretty vulnerable when you realize one bullet can, and will, end you. This is multiplayer FPS done hardcore, a kind of warts-and-all Battlefield where teams fight to either push forward or hold a position. Respawns can only be done at player-built structures, or, if said structures have been overrun, way back behind the action. Staying alive is as valuable as getting kills — but at first both seem next to impossible with only an old bolt-action rifle to defend yourself with. It’s harder for online WW2 games to retain a respectful tone, but this one does it by amply conveying the horrors of attritional war and the abject terror of being one solider placed in a vast conflict.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

The German SS Paranormal Division releases a powerful curse at an Egyptian dig site and subsequently harnesses the power of zombies to help in the war effort — at least until one turkey-guzzling soldier singlehandedly disables the remote medieval castle where the reanimation experiments are taking place, saves his captured OSA chum, and assassinates the officers in charge of the whole division.

We’ve consulted the history books, and we’re pretty sure none of this happened. It’s perhaps a stretch to call this a World War 2 game, but Wolfenstein has always combined elements of the real war with supernatural lore to great effect. The id Tech 3-powered visuals wowed us with what we considered photorealism by 2001 standards, but the pace, variation and environmental integration of the combat still holds up magnificently today.

Post Scriptum

As hardcore as it gets. Two teams of 40 battling with period-authentic weaponry in the French countryside in slow, methodical and deliberate fashion. Battlefield might let you get away with sprinting into the fray and trying to bag a few kills if your aim’s good enough, but Post Scriptum crushes all notions of heroic solo efforts with an uncaring artillery shell and a respawn screen. Instead, logistics, armor and infantry divisions need to support each other and move in carefully timed pushes. Broken supply lines and a bunch of soldiers wandering about on their own make for swiftly lost matches.

Steel Division 2

Steel Division 2 loves the technical specs of Second World War vehicles, machinery and weaponry. A lot. All the properties of its unit types are underpinned by real historical details, and you can’t help but get caught up in the passion it clearly has for preserving what we know about how the war was actually fought. That makes you think about ammo differently — even if their morale holds out, an infantry unit can only battle for so long before they’re out of rounds and need the supply truck to roll in more. Heavier weaponry like mounted artillery and tanks might take actual minutes to reload a single round, so you have to be damn sure you’re hitting the target when you fire them. Vast in single-player and downright scary in its 20-player online battles.

Battlefield V

Battlefield V takes the cinematic, stylized vision of war pioneered in Medal of Honor and applies it not just to its solo campaign but those trademark online battles too. It’s an odd moment when you’re distracted from fighting for your life in a bombed-out Dutch bank to admire the reflections of its marble floor, or catch a glimpse of the plane that’s about to kill you in the bonnet of a nearby car. It’s even odder to realize you’ve been playing in spectator mode all evening just to frame the action like a wartime Roger Deakins. Then, of course, there’s the interplay of huge player numbers and vehicles over land, sea and sky that makes Battlefield what it is, and the war stories it seems to generate every time you play with friends. Never without bugs, and always prone to making you feel insignificant in the larger fray, it’s nevertheless an essential virtual depiction of WW2.

Unity of Command 2

There will be no silver-tongued diplomatic wins or ceasefires here. This is an operations-level war game, a detached view of the conflict enjoyed only by top brass, and despite its complexity Unity of Command 2 plays with unusual intuitiveness. Spanning North African operations in 1943 through to the conclusion of Western Front fighting in 1945, it gives you plenty of different combat scenarios but never an easy or repeatable solution to them, each one specific in its geography and resources. As you wrestle with the needs and specialities of different divisions, the limited assets HQs across the map give you, and an ever-changing front, Unity of Command 2 is uniquely positioned to describe what a nightmare it is to cleave organisation out of conflict’s sheer chaos.

Commandos 2

There are WW2 shooters; there are WW2 strategy games. And then, poking out from under a pile of memories you accumulated between 1998 and today, there’s Commandos 2: Men of Courage, reminding you of a different approach altogether. With just a handful of highly specialized men, an isometric perspective and a screen full of patrolling enemies, you’re expected to pull off objectives that at first seem impossible.

That’s until you really get to know each Commando’s abilities. The Green Beret’s climbing and carrying skills, the spy’s knack for disguise, the Marine’s judicious use of a harpoon gun. And of course, the sniper, scuttling into a building with a high vantage point and popping off rounds with relish. It’s only when you lean into each team member’s specialties that the intricate puzzles of timing and disarming feel not just solvable but massively satisfying.

Call of Duty

Feel free to place your own personal CoD pick in this slot. 2017’s Call Of Duty: WW2 told a touching tale. World at War managed to live up to its title and at the same time laid multiplayer foundations that its modern descendants still employ. More recently, Vanguard showed us an old CoD can learn a few new tricks.

But we have to go back to the 2003 Infinity Ward original to find the franchise depicting the historical conflict in its most startling, empathetic and memorable ways. Although Medal of Honor had shown the industry how to adapt an already fictionalized cinematic image of the war, Call of Duty found both design and technical breakthroughs that let it permeate on a deeper level. The rattle of gunfire and artillery was unrelenting and agitates something primal when you play. There’s a desperation in the voices of your squadmates, whether they’re trying to convey orders or delivering incidental dialogue. And in the changes of perspective between U.S., British and Soviet campaigns, it finds a humanistic tone that’s hard to nail. Also, the guns feel amazing and explosions and stuff.

Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.