Call Of Duty Vanguard Review
Games like Call of Duty might be contradictory at times. Each new game in the franchise is required to have a distinct feel, such as short kill times and consistent movement and weapon techniques, as well as storylines that combine a big sense of scale with a high level of individual battle intensity. All of these elements are present in Call of Duty: Vanguard, but the formula is strained.
Sometimes, like in the single-player campaign, Call of Duty’s underlying features appear to hold it back. Other times, especially with some of its multiplayer offerings, it makes useful strides ahead in uniting themes that steadily advance the series. Vanguard, on the other hand, feels unequal because of the Call of Duty template. It reaches some impressive heights but frequently stumbles.
Vanguard returns to World War II, but this time in a dramatised and exaggerated form. It places you in the shoes of four veteran heroes as they assemble the first modern special forces team. The storey can be a little ludicrous at times—it feels like Call of Duty’s take on The Expendables, as it gathers together a squad of unkillable action heroes—but it’s also appropriate for a game in which you kill hundreds of enemies by yourself in each mission. The storey takes you through memories for each character, establishing why they’re the best, before allowing them to work together to hijack a Nazi train and destroy a Nazi base.
Your special forces team is travelling to Berlin at the end of the war, hoping to get information on a secret programme before the Nazis bury it ahead of the Red Army’s arrival. The game is presented as a series of interrogations after the bad guys catch the heroes, and the team you play is matched by super-evil Nazis on the other side (Lord of the Rings’ Dominic Monaghan as a wormy Nazi nerd is particularly entertaining to dislike).
Indeed, Vanguard devotes a significant amount of time to cutscenes and character development. Creating memorable characters and pushing into the storyline is something the franchise has struggled with in the past, and much of what makes the campaign enjoyable is how focused Vanguard is on putting together your team: it’s all about the characters all the time. That keeps the plot from being incoherent as it jumps throughout the war’s timeframe and the globe, dumping you in significant battles to discover how each character got to where they are.
However, the Vanguard half of the game struggles to keep up with the standard Call of Duty half in those moments of character development. The campaign is focused on presenting each of your team’s individuals with their own missions, taking you to several World War II theatres in the hopes of providing a range of experiences in a variety of settings. However, it’s hit-or-miss; Vanguard aims to make each of the characters feel like specialists by giving them different skills, but not all of the notions associated with them work particularly well.
Polina, a Russian sniper who fought in the Battle of Stalingrad, is the campaign’s outstanding character. Polina is faster and more agile than the other characters, allowing her to sneak under tables and through small places and climb walls to reach sniper vantage points. When she isn’t sniping, she slips through bombed-out buildings, slipping behind enemy soldiers and stabbing them in the neck before vanishing into the wreckage.
Her character-specific ability—flashing a knife to entice a sniper into wasting a shot so she may identify and finish them off—is only usable in extremely narrow situations. It doesn’t provide you with an advantage in a fight; instead, it simply allows you to kill snipers when they appear, and so feels less like talent and more like a button you press at the appropriate time.
Other missions and personalities, on the other hand, are less compelling and distinct. Lucas, an explosives expert facing German tank battalions in North Africa, battles in a similar manner to British team leader and paratrooper Arthur and American pilot Wade Jackson. Lucas’ particular talent is to carry a variety of grenades, and when it’s time for him to shine, he usually just throws grenades. Arthur can also direct his comrades to concentrate their fire on certain targets, sometimes suppressing them.
There’s no actual strategy here; you’re perfectly within your rights to command your team to keep shooting at a target until you flank and kill it, and when they stop, you just order them to start shooting at it again. Most of the time, you only have one option for directing squadmates to target, and there are never more than two, therefore the best course of action is to simply fight an adversary until it is defeated.
Wade’s section of the game is the poorest, with a diversion to an aerial operation over the Pacific that combines muddled objectives, sloppy controls, and tedious dogfights. Wade has the peculiar “Focus” ability when he’s not in a plane, which allows him to detect adversaries through walls and underbrush for a short length of time, but it doesn’t give you any intriguing variations on the fight you’ve been playing for hours. Wade’s skill is largely used to sneak past opposing combatants during one of his missions, but it’s never obvious how or why they discover you, resulting in a much more vexing stealth portion where you simply stay as far away from everyone as the straight road will allow.
All of this adds up to a campaign that has its exciting moments but falls short of its goal of making you feel as if you’re experiencing distinct sections of World War II or playing as individuals with certain abilities. The narrative is highly linear in the Call of Duty tradition, with limited opportunity to employ specific skills. Furthermore, so many events and aspects are programmed in such a way that if you don’t play the game exactly as intended, you’ll notice the fractures in the missions right away.
Like Wade, I turned a mounted machine gun on enemies rushing toward my squad’s location, only for them to respawn in the same spots seconds later, indicating that I wasn’t intended to be fighting back. In another, Arthur hid in a cellar to avoid Nazi troops, who, despite the fact that the entrance they were chasing him through was wide open, didn’t bother to pursue him.
Multiplayer performs better, while Vanguard’s attempts to focus on character clash with the Call of Duty framework. You can play multiplayer as a variety of “operator” characters, including campaign characters, but the Call of Duty player-vs-player experience requires that they all have the same abilities. So the emphasis on the operators—they even have their own special cutscenes when you choose them—really isn’t much more than a way to gain fresh character skins.
Even though they’re primarily iterative changes to the familiar, the additions to multiplayer are positive. Destructible walls and doors abound on the maps, allowing you to create fresh sightlines or shoot individuals through the thin cover. The destruction increases the overall mayhem by allowing bullets to fly from more places, pushing you to pay attention to how things are progressing. This gives multiplayer matches a dynamic feel, requiring you to think quickly and alter your strategy.
Vanguard also adds several new features and tweaks to the standard multiplayer experience. A new option in the competitive menu allows you to fine-tune the types of matches you want to play, leaning either larger team clashes on larger maps or smaller, more intense firefights that get you into the action faster. The Patrol mode is a standout, adding mobility to the control points found in Hardpoint encounters and forcing you to chase them across the map frequently, adding to the dynamic flow of engagements while also encouraging creative thinking to catch opponents off guard.
There’s also Champion Hill, which combines elements of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s Gun Game with Call of Duty: Warzone’s high-speed, low-player-count intensity. Single players or teams of two or three compete in a round-robin format, with each team having a certain amount of lives and earning money from kills. That money may then be spent on perks, new weapons and upgrades, and armour to give you an advantage, but winning a fight frequently boils down to strong teamwork and smart movement around the battlefield due to the fast pace of warfare. It’s a delightful take on tried-and-true Call of Duty concepts, resulting in a lot of heart-pounding competitive moments in our multiplayer sessions.
The modifications here offer Vanguard a sense of heightened customization and fluidity, presenting you with the ability to seek out the kind of Call of Duty experience you enjoy, along with a significant emphasis on designing interesting weapon load-outs via the Gunsmith menu. Weapon unlocks also transfer between modes, so there’s a compelling motivation to dabble in everything Vanguard has to offer while also reducing the amount of grinding required to increase your arsenal. Vanguard multiplayer seems a lot like standard Call of Duty fare, so if you enjoyed Modern Warfare or Black Ops Cold War, you’ll definitely enjoy this. Though the changes aren’t all significant, they’re all worthwhile additions that give the series a new dimension.
The perpetual Zombies mode is where Vanguard makes the biggest modifications, however, a portion of the experience is presently missing. In the past, zombies have been an intriguing addition to Call of Duty as a sort of horde-mode puzzle box that players must both survive and solve. The issue has frequently been that the mode is enigmatic and difficult to grasp. Treyarch, the creators of Zombies in the first place, returned to work on the mode and drastically streamlined it in a variety of ways.
You’ll start the game in a central hub area, where you can enhance your character as you collect points by eliminating foes. You progress by activating portals that take you to areas with specific objectives, such as staying in a zone as it moves through a level, as in the PvP Patrol mode; holding out for a few minutes in a tight room as it fills with zombies; and gathering runes that drop off dead zombies and returning them to a specific point to fill an objective metre.
The goals are well-defined and straightforward, which isn’t usually the case in Zombies. As you complete tasks, you will progress through waves of adversaries that become increasingly difficult, as well as unlocking more areas of the hub area to gain access to additional improvements. The clarity offered to how to work your way through Zombies and thrive in it makes it a lot of fun, even if you’re not a die-hard.
The problem is that Zombies does not have the puzzle box feel that made the mode so popular in the first place. With the release of the first Vanguard new season on December 2, the story-centric “Easter egg hunt” that has defined Zombies will reportedly return. However, in comparison to other games, Zombies feels a little lacklustre till then. It’s entertaining to watch how long you can endure as the waves become increasingly difficult, but there’s currently no overarching aim. Because of this missing feature, Zombies feels like a filler before returning to PvP or finishing the narrative.
And that’s a big problem with Vanguard: things don’t always seem right. Zombies have been improved, but it still lacks the qualities that make them worthwhile to play over and over. The campaign’s emphasis on personalities gives the plot some heft, but its attempts to convey the sensation of playing as a variety of specialists frequently fall flat. Competitive multiplayer makes a few tweaks to the main formula to make the game feel more dynamic, but they’re mostly minor improvements.
The problem about Call of Duty games is that you pretty much know what you’re getting with each annual iteration—and that’s mostly true here. For Vanguard, though, it is both a blessing and a burden. Vanguard’s concepts don’t always mesh well with the franchise’s framework, but they do feel like good additions to the genre. The campaign’s good gunplay, entertaining multiplayer, and creative moments are all worth searching out. But, at times, combining those two components reveals the game’s flaws, diminishing both parts of the game rather than driving one to the forefront.