WWII...again

Since I've been back from snowboarding, I haven't had a whole lot of time to get back into console gaming, but that should change this week while the wife is out of town. It's just me and the dog, and he's pretty bad w/ a controller.
I've been playing some Call of Duty: World at War campaign and trying to decide if I like it. It's certainly no Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I think I really prefer the modern setting for better weapons and relevant settings. WWII has been way overdone in games. In fact, I keep getting this confused with the other ones I've played. Medal of Honor: Airborne comes to mind, but I'm sure there's others. Treyarch has certainly picked up a few few tricks from the folks that did Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward), but I don't ever remember being this frustrated with COD4. I know that endless streams of enemies and frantic action is kind of the thing for the COD series, but in this one it seems like I keep crossing an invisible line where the game decides "oh, okay, he made it past the checkpoint guys, everybody stop shooting!" It's sort of eerie, really. There will be crap blowing up everywhere and your vision is obscured by dust and blood but when you advance past a certain rock and the commander yells that it's all clear and the enemies seem to disappear all of a sudden. Ok, it's a bit more subtle than that, but still sort of annoying.
I also seem to find spots where I get killed about 5 times in a row but decide to try a slightly different strategy and get past it no problem. So I'm sort of frustrated with it, but I guess I'll push on through to the end. I looked it up and I guess I'm on mission 12 of 15, so the end is not too far away.
One thing that I do appreciate is that you play sections in the Pacific Theater and as a Russian soldier pushing into the heart of Germany. This, at least is sort of new for WWII games. Also, the cut scenes are great multimedia presentations that give you a sense of the progression of the war including real footage (which is sometimes surprisingly graphic) from the time. My wife told her friends about this and they thought it was terrible that a game uses these graphic scenes, but I think it's nice to remind you that this stuff actually happened.
I doubt I'll bother with the multiplayer much even though I just cashed in one of my One Free Month of Xbox Live Gold cards. I did that mainly to play Left 4 Dead, which I'm loving, but will talk about in another post.