Best Call of Duty WW2 Games Ranked on PC: The 2003 Original (91) Beats WWII (73) and Vanguard (72)

The best World War II Call of Duty on PC is still the first one. Call of Duty (2003) has a PC Metascore of 91 and 94% positive Steam reviews, against 73 and 66% for Call of Duty: WWII (2017) and 72 and 67% for Vanguard (2021). The three top-ranked games (the 2003 original, Call of Duty 2 and World at War) cost $19.99 each on Steam, $59.97 together. WWII on its own is $59.99.

That also breaks the usual line that WWII beats Vanguard on everything except sales. It doesn’t. WWII is a point ahead with critics (73 to 72), Vanguard is a point ahead with English-language Steam reviewers (67% to 66%), and the sales record covered below does not show Vanguard ahead. The head-to-head table further down shows where each one actually leads.

Verified on 1 November 2026. Metascores, Steam percentages, prices and player counts are snapshots from that day and will move. Scores are Metacritic’s PC pages, not the console-led headline scores. We did not play-test these games for this ranking.

Quick Start: Which One to Play, in Six Steps

1. Want the best-reviewed WWII Call of Duty on PC? Buy Call of Duty (2003): Metascore 91, 94% positive, $19.99.
2. Want regenerating health and a more modern feel? Buy Call of Duty 2: 86, 92%, $19.99.
3. Want the Pacific and Eastern Front, plus the birth of Zombies? Buy World at War: 83, 92%, $19.99.
4. Want a D-Day campaign with native widescreen, 4K and HDR? Call of Duty: WWII edges Vanguard on our tie-break, but at $59.99 it ranks fifth of six.
5. Eyeing Vanguard at $59.99? Only for its Zombies mode, which acts as a prologue to Black Ops Cold War’s story. The three $19.99 games above all score higher.
6. Looking for Call of Duty 3? It never came out on PC.

How We Ranked Them (and What Counts as a WW2 Call of Duty)

Six mainline Call of Duty games are set in World War II, by the count in our Call of Duty games in order guide: Call of Duty, Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 3, World at War, WWII and Vanguard. We add United Offensive, the 2004 expansion, because Steam sells it separately. Call of Duty 3 is unranked because it has no PC release, and console-only spin-offs are out of scope.

Each game’s score is the average of two numbers anyone can look up: its Metacritic PC Metascore and its English-language positive share on Steam (our calculation, rounded to the nearest half point). A tie goes to the game with the higher all-language Steam share. The takeaway: the four older games score 86.5 to 92.5, and the two modern ones both land at 69.5.

The Ranking, Game by Game

1. Call of Duty (2003): Still the Highest-Scoring WW2 Call of Duty

The original has the best PC Metascore (91) and the best Steam score (94% of 3,668 English-language reviews) of any game here. Infinity Ward told the war through three campaigns, American, British and Soviet, and gave you AI squadmates who react to what is happening around you, which pulled the genre away from the lone-wolf shooter. You can also save and load at any time instead of relying on checkpoints.

The cost is age. Wikipedia notes that retrospective critics say it aged poorly, health comes from medkits rather than regeneration, and PCGamingWiki rates widescreen support as “hackable”, meaning you set the resolution and aspect ratio by editing a config file on a modern monitor. Play it if you want the original campaign for $19.99. Skip it if you want regenerating health or widescreen that works out of the box.

2. Call of Duty 2 (2005): The Formula Arrives

Call of Duty 2 is the best place to start if you want the series as it later became: regenerating health and a grenade-warning icon both arrived here. It scores 86 and 92% positive across 4,178 English-language reviews, and it has the highest Steam player count of the six (496 when we checked). Four campaigns across three stories (Red Army, US Army and two British) add up to 27 missions, and some put you in a tank.

PCGamingWiki rates its widescreen support “limited”, with a community mod called Letlev Edition fixing menus and aspect ratios, while 4K works. Play it if you want one cheap WWII game with a modern health system. Skip it if you don’t want to install a mod to tidy the menus.

3. World at War (2008): The Best Treyarch WWII Game

World at War takes the series to the Pacific and the Eastern Front, following Marine Raider Private Miller and Red Army Private Petrenko. It scores 83 and 92% positive across 33,669 English-language reviews, the biggest review pool of the six (49,991 across all languages), and Wikipedia says retrospective reviews count it among the series’ best WWII entries. It is also where Zombies began: the first map, Nacht der Untoten, launches automatically when you finish the last campaign mission.

PCGamingWiki rates widescreen and 4K as working, with a default frame cap of 85 FPS you can lift in the console. Play it if you want WWII’s grimmest campaign and the Zombies origin story. Skip it if you want a gentle war: reviewers praised its intensity and violence, and some found it too close to earlier games.

4. United Offensive (2004): The Best Add-On, Not a Standalone

United Offensive has the second-highest Metascore of the six PC releases (87) but only 86% positive Steam reviews from 1,191 players, which is why it ranks fourth. Gray Matter Studios and Pi Studios built its Bastogne, Sicily and Kursk campaigns, but the main changes are in multiplayer: larger maps, tanks and jeeps, and an in-game rank system. Steam says it requires the Steam version of the original game.

Buy it if you own the original and want bigger multiplayer maps. Skip it if you only want a single-player campaign, or if you don’t own the first game. Only 55 people were playing it on Steam when we checked.

5. Call of Duty: WWII (2017): Ahead of Vanguard on the Tie-Break

WWII scores 73 on Metacritic’s PC page and 66% positive across 14,238 English-language Steam reviews. Check the platform filter: Metacritic’s headline page for the game shows 79, while the PC-only page shows 73. Sledgehammer set the campaign on D-Day and the Western Front with the 1st Infantry Division, and dropped campaign health regeneration for health packs and a medic squadmate. Multiplayer swapped create-a-class for Divisions and added a 48-player Headquarters set on Omaha Beach. Critics praised the story, combat, multiplayer and visuals, and marked it down for a single-player campaign that broke little new ground.

It has native widescreen, ultrawide, 4K and HDR support per PCGamingWiki, and 334 players on Steam at check time. Play it if you want a grounded D-Day campaign with current PC options. Skip it if $59.99 is the sticking point: three higher-scoring WWII games cost less combined.

6. Vanguard (2021): The One to Skip at Full Price

Vanguard ties WWII on our composite (69.5) and loses the tie-break: its all-language Steam share is 66.5%, against 71.5% for WWII. The campaign jumps between Tobruk, Midway, Stalingrad and Normandy. Multiplayer added Champion Hill, a round-robin squad deathmatch, and Combat Pacing filters, and the Zombies mode, set as a prologue to Black Ops Cold War’s story, opens with a map called Der Anfang. Critics praised the campaign, multiplayer and graphics, and criticised the writing, the Zombies mode and a lack of innovation.

Steam lists Vanguard as released on 8 March 2023 (it launched on Windows in November 2021), so the 106 Steam players we counted are a partial picture of its audience. Play it if you want the Zombies prologue and don’t mind paying $59.99. Skip it if you’d rather spend $59.97 on the three top-ranked games in this list.

Unranked: Call of Duty 3 (2006)

Treyarch’s Call of Duty 3 is the only major installment that never released on PC, so it has no PC Metascore. Metacritic’s page shows 82, a console-era score, and it should stay off a PC buying list.

WWII vs Vanguard: Where Each One Actually Leads

WWII leads on all-language Steam reviews and on how its sales were received, and Vanguard leads nowhere by more than noise. The table shows one real review gap, one real difference in how each met its publisher’s expectations, and two near-ties.

Critics put WWII a point ahead, 73 to 72, and on English-language Steam reviews Vanguard is a point ahead, 67% to 66%. With 1,558 reviews the sampling error is roughly 2.3 points (our calculation, treating reviews as a random sample, which they are not), so call both of those ties. Counting every language, Steam’s review histogram puts WWII ahead 71.5% to 66.5%, on 36,278 reviews against 4,496.

The “but sales” half of the usual line has it backwards. GamesIndustry.biz reported that WWII made more than $500 million in three days, double Infinite Warfare’s launch, and GameSpot reported Activision putting it past $1 billion worldwide by 20 December 2017 as the top-grossing console game of the year in North America. Vanguard was also the best seller of its year in the US by dollars, with Black Ops Cold War second, per NPD figures published by GamesBeat, so it did not flop in absolute terms. Its own publisher still wrote in its annual report that the 2021 release “didn’t meet our expectations, we believe primarily due to our own execution”, and that the WWII setting “didn’t resonate with some of our community”, as VGC quoted. VGC also reported Vanguard’s UK opening week down 40% on Cold War’s, using GSD sales data. We found no like-for-like unit counts for either game, so “WWII outsold Vanguard” is unproven. What is on record is that WWII’s launch doubled its predecessor’s and passed $1 billion, and that Vanguard’s publisher said its game missed expectations.

The design gap is easier to see than the sales gap. WWII went “boots on the ground”, with no double jumps or wall-running, and a campaign set in one theatre, Europe. Vanguard added Champion Hill and Combat Pacing and a campaign that hops across theatres. If you want the grounded D-Day story, play WWII. If you want the multi-theatre squad story plus a Zombies prologue to Cold War, Vanguard is the one that offers that combination, at the same $59.99.

Which to Buy: Verdicts by Player Type

Match your play style to a purchase rather than buying the newest game by default. The pattern is simple: the $19.99 games win on value, and the $59.99 games are for specific tastes.

Starter pack: Call of Duty (2003), Call of Duty 2 and World at War, $59.97 together at Steam list price. They are all Windows games from the same decade, sold separately on Steam. Expect a widescreen fix for the first, a menu mod for the second, and nothing extra for World at War beyond an optional frame-cap edit. Add United Offensive ($19.99) only if you play multiplayer on the original.

The Steam player counts above include people playing campaign or Zombies, so they are a ceiling for multiplayer, and we have not tested matchmaking in any of these games. If you’re shopping beyond WWII, our best history games list covers Hell Let Loose as the WWII multiplayer pick, and the Black Ops 7 guide covers the current game.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is the best Call of Duty WW2 game?

The 2003 original, on PC: Metascore 91 and 94% positive on Steam. Call of Duty 2 is the better pick if you want regenerating health and the most Steam players (496 against 91 for the original when we checked). We rank on reviews rather than nostalgia, and reviews barely separate a 91 from an 86, so choose on features.

Is Call of Duty: WWII better than Vanguard?

Slightly, and not on every measure. Critics put WWII a point ahead, English-language Steam reviewers favour Vanguard by a point, and WWII wins all-language Steam reviews and has the stronger documented sales record: its launch doubled its predecessor’s, while Vanguard’s publisher said it missed expectations. If you can only buy one at $59.99, WWII is the safer choice, but the safer choice still ranks fifth of six.

Is Vanguard worth buying in 2026?

At the $59.99 Steam list price, we’d say no. Three higher-scoring WWII games cost $59.97 together. The exceptions are Zombies fans who want the Cold War prologue, and anyone who values Vanguard’s globe-trotting campaign over its scores.

Is Call of Duty 3 on PC?

No. Wikipedia calls it the only major installment in the series that never released on PC, so there is no PC score to rank it by.

Can you still play multiplayer in the older games?

Some players are online: Steam showed 496 in Call of Duty 2 and 451 in World at War at about 20:30 UTC on 1 November 2026. Those counts include campaign and Zombies players, so treat them as an upper bound for multiplayer.

Sources

1. Metacritic. PC critic-review pages for each game, linked from the scores in the ranking table. Metacritic
2. Valve. Steam store pages for each game, linked from the review shares in the ranking table, with the Steam review histogram and current-player API checked on 1 November 2026. Steam
3. Wikipedia. Call of Duty (video game). Wikimedia Foundation
4. Wikipedia. Call of Duty: United Offensive. Wikimedia Foundation
5. Wikipedia. Call of Duty 2. Wikimedia Foundation
6. Wikipedia. Call of Duty 3. Wikimedia Foundation
7. Wikipedia. Call of Duty: World at War. Wikimedia Foundation
8. Wikipedia. Call of Duty: WWII. Wikimedia Foundation
9. Wikipedia. Call of Duty: Vanguard. Wikimedia Foundation
10. Ivan, T. Activision says Call of Duty: Vanguard underperformed partly due to WW2 setting (5 May 2022). Video Games Chronicle (linked in the text)
11. Robinson, A. Sources: Vanguard was Call of Duty’s worst UK launch in 14 years (14 November 2021). Video Games Chronicle (linked in the text)
12. Dring, C. Call of Duty: WWII doubles Infinite Warfare sales worldwide (8 November 2017). GamesIndustry.biz, Internet Archive copy (linked in the text)
13. Makuch, E. Call of Duty: WW 2 passes $1 billion in worldwide sales (20 December 2017). GameSpot, Internet Archive copy (linked in the text)
14. Grubb, J. NPD: The top 20 best-selling games of 2021 in the U.S. (18 January 2022). GamesBeat (linked in the text)
15. PCGamingWiki. Call of Duty: WWII. PCGamingWiki
16. PCGamingWiki. Call of Duty: Vanguard. PCGamingWiki
17. PCGamingWiki. Call of Duty 2. PCGamingWiki
18. PCGamingWiki. Call of Duty and Call of Duty: World at War, read 1 November 2026. PCGamingWiki (linked in the text)

Michael R.

I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.