The elusive Call Of Duty: World at War beta showed up in my email yesterday and like the other 40,000 or so gamers that received the beta codes, I ran out and downloaded it as soon as I could. After redeeming my code and downloading the 890 MB file, I was greeted to a welcome screen that stated the following:

Welcome! The Online Multiplayer Beta is a sneak peak at the Call of Duty: World at War multiplayer experience. This Beta contains a few early versions of the maps, modes, and features of the full game. have fun and we’ll see you online.

- Treyarch Development team

Hit the jump to see my thoughts and some details on the CoD5 beta.

The beta allows you to play a few modes to get a feel for the different styles of play like: War (holding territories to win), Capture the Flag (classic capture and defense of your flag), Team Deathmatch (team with the most points wins), Pick-Up TDM (same as Team Deathmatch but you can’t bring parties in) and Free For All (every man for themselves, whoever has the most points wins). If you look in the Barracks section, you will also note that there are a few confirmed but non-playable modes to come to the full game like Sabotage, Search and Destroy, and Domination.

One quick upgrade from CoD4 is that you can now create and name up to 10 custom classes, which let you set your primary weapon, side arm, primary grenade, special grenade, 3 perks and a vehicle perk. This is great for those who ran out of space with CoD4’s 5 slots for custom classes.

Being set in the World War II era, the main countries you will be playing as are the Americans, the Japanese, the Russians, and the Germans, so all weapons are based from that era and those weapon makers. As I jumped into the first few matches, I quickly got my head taken off as I got used to the new maps and old style weapons. Once I played a few Team Deathmatch rounds and got my bearings, things started to click and the game almost came as second nature, as the controls and gameplay are modeled direct from Call of Duty 4.

Playing through the levels, my main thought was that the game played very well, but the levels were just too congested with a plethora of items and a poor palette of colors. The dark brown colors didn’t just bother me aesthetically, they also made it hard to pick up your enemies. When you mix that with a ton of items thrown all over the stages, this makes for a headache tracking your enemies. Some levels do offer up a few interesting places to hide right out in the open, like in the grass in the middle of a field or behind some debris, but for me, the level designs left much to be desired.

The killing streak perks are back in the WW2 style, with certain upgrades like a pack of dogs, a bombing run, or a recon plane. The dogs that you call will fight for you and both help to kill your enemies and locate them. A nice touch is that as you play as the Germans, you will get German Shepherds as your dogs. The Recon plane you get acts as a radar sweeper of the area and shows you the locations of the enemies as dots on the HUD.

Although the beta is capped at Level 11, there is a good deal of game to play and lots of people playing online for you to get a good feel for the game. Some may argue that this can be considered CoD 4.5 since the guys over at Treyarch used the CoD4 engine and tweaked certain portions of the game to give it a different feel. If you are a fan of Call of Duty 4, this will be right up your alley. Although the World War II feel is getting a bit old, this game looks to be quite fun.

Also, if you listen closely while playing as the Americans, you will hear the familiar voice of Jack Bauer, or Kiefer Sutherland if you are more familiar with his real life name. It threw me for a loop when I heard him making comments during the game. Overall, it’s a fun beta and the game looks to be pretty good.