Call Of Duty: Vanguard Review

Call of Duty games might be contradictory at times. Each new game in the franchise is required to have a distinct feel—things like short kill times and consistent approaches to movement and weapons, as well as missions that combine a big feeling of scale with individual battle intensity. All of this is maintained in Call of Duty: Vanguard, but the formula is strained.

There are times when Call of Duty's core aspects, such as its single-player campaign, appear to hold it back. Other times, as with some of its multiplayer offers, it makes useful strides toward uniting themes that, albeit incrementally, move the series ahead. Vanguard, on the other hand, feels unequal due to the Call of Duty model. It reaches some impressive heights but stumbles frequently along the way.

Vanguard returns to World War II, but this time with a romanticised and exaggerated perspective. It puts you in the shoes of four seasoned 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 on your own in each mission. The tale takes you through the backstory for each character, establishing why they're the best, and then allowing them to work together to hijack a Nazi train and destroy a Nazi base.

Near the conclusion of the war, your special forces squad is travelling to Berlin in the hopes of gathering info on a secret programme before the Nazis bury it ahead of the Red Army's arrival. The game is framed as a series of interrogations after the bad guys capture 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 fun to hate), and the majority of the game is framed as a series of interrogations after the bad guys capture the heroes.

In reality, Vanguard devotes a significant amount of time to cutscenes and character development. Creating memorable characters and diving into the storyline is something the franchise has struggled with in the past, and a big part of what makes the campaign so enjoyable is how focused Vanguard is on establishing 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, landing you in significant battles to show how each character got to where they are now.

The Vanguard half of the game, however, suffers against the standard Call of Duty half in those moments of character development. The campaign is focused on presenting each of your team's players with their own missions, taking you to several World War II areas in an attempt to provide a range of experiences in different settings. Vanguard aims to make each of the characters feel like specialists by giving them different powers, but not all of the ideas associated with them work particularly well.

Polina, a Russian sniper and hero of the Battle of Stalingrad, is the campaign's prominent character. Polina is more agile and swift than the other characters, allowing her to sneak under tables and through small spaces, as well as scale walls to reach sniper perches. When she isn't sniping, she slips through bombed-out buildings, slipping behind enemy soldiers and stabbing them in the neck before disappearing among the rubble.

Her character-specific skill, 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 offer you an advantage in a fight, but rather allows you to kill snipers when they appear, thus it feels more like a button you press at the right time than skill.

Other missions and personalities, on the other hand, are less fascinating and distinct. Lucas, an explosives expert facing German tank battalions in North Africa, fights in a similar manner to Arthur, the British team leader and paratrooper, and Wade Jackson, the American pilot. 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 command his colleagues 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 do it again. Most of the time, you only have one option for directing squadmates to target, and there are seldom more than two, therefore the best decision is to simply fight one adversary until it is defeated.

Wade's section of the game is the poorest, with a diversion to an airborne operation over the Pacific that combines muddled objectives, sloppy controls, and dull dogfights. Wade has the peculiar "Focus" ability when he's not on a plane, which allows him to detect enemies through walls and underbrush for a short period of time, but it doesn't give you any interesting iterations on the fight you've been playing for hours at that point. Wade's skill is largely used for sneaking past opposing combatants during one of his missions, but it's never obvious how or why they discover you, leading to a much more vexing stealth part in which you simply stay as far away from everyone as the straight path will allow.

It all adds up to a campaign that has its exhilarating moments but falls short of its goal of making you feel like you're experiencing distinct sections of World War II or playing as people with certain abilities. The usage of certain abilities is tightly restricted, and the game is extremely linear in the traditional Call of Duty fashion. Furthermore, so many moments and parts are designed in such a way that if you don't play exactly as intended, you'll notice the fractures in missions right away.

Like Wade, I turned a mounted machine gun on enemies rushing into my squad's position, only for them to respawn in the exact same spots seconds later, indicating that I wasn't intended to be truly attempting to repel the attack. In another, Arthur hid in a cellar to avoid Nazi troops, who, despite the fact that the door they chased him through was wide open, didn't bother following him.

The multiplayer experience is better, though Vanguard's attempts to focus on character clash with the Call of Duty architecture on that side of the experience as well. In multiplayer, you can play as a variety of "operator" characters, including those from the campaign, although the essence of the Call of Duty player-vs.-player experience requires that they all have the same abilities. So the operators' importance—they even have their own special cutscenes when you choose them—really amounts to little more than the opportunity to gain new character skins.

Even though they're primarily iterative changes to the familiar, the multiplayer additions are positive. Destructible walls, like destructible doors, litter the maps, allowing you to create fresh sightlines or blast people through the weak cover. The destruction gives new paths and tactical choices, as well as boosting the general pandemonium by allowing bullets to fly from more areas, forcing you to pay attention to what's going on. This gives online encounters a sense of changing over time, adding fascinating energy to battles that force you to think quickly and alter your strategy.

Vanguard also adds some new modes and tweaks to the standard multiplayer experience. A new option in the competitive menu lets you fine-tune the types of matches you want to play, leaning toward 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 seen 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: Warzone with the high-speed, low-player-count intensity of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's Gun Game. In a round-robin competition, Champion Hill sets single players or teams of two or three against each other, with each team having a certain amount of lives and earning money from kills. That money can be spent on perks, new weapons and upgrades, and armour to give you an advantage, but due to the speed of battle, winning a fight frequently boils down to strong teamwork and smart movement around the map. It's a delightful take on tried-and-true Call of Duty concepts, resulting in a lot of heart-racing competitive moments in our multiplayer sessions.

The modifications here offer Vanguard a feeling 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 transfer between modes as well, so there's a compelling reason to dabble in everything Vanguard has to offer while also reducing the amount of grinding required to increase your arsenal. Many of Vanguard's multiplayer options feel like standard Call of Duty material, so if you've been enjoying Modern Warfare or Black Ops Cold War, you'll definitely enjoy this. Though the changes aren't all enormous, they're all solid additions that add fresh diversity to the series as a whole.

The perennial Zombies mode is where Vanguard makes the biggest modifications, however, a portion of that experience is now missing. In the past, zombies have been an intriguing addition to Call of Duty as a kind of horde-mode puzzle box that players must both survive and solve. The issue has frequently been that the method is enigmatic and difficult to comprehend. Treyarch, the creators of Zombies in the first place, returned to work on this mode and drastically streamlined it in a number of clever ways.

You'll now enter the model in a central hub area, where you'll be able to enhance your character as you gain 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 small 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 meter.

The goals are clear and well-defined, 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 portions of the hub area to gain access to further upgrades. Vanguard's take on the mode is welcoming to newcomers interested in testing out one of the franchise's strongest and greatest innovations, and the clarity provided on how to master Zombies makes it a lot of fun, even if you're not a die-hard fan.

The problem is that Zombies lack the puzzle box feel that made the mode so popular in the first place. The story-centric "Easter egg hunt" that has defined Zombies is expected to begin on December 2 with the release of the first Vanguard content season. However, in comparison to previous games, Zombies feels a little missing till then. It's entertaining to watch how long you can endure as the waves become more difficult, but there's no overarching purpose at the present. Because of this missing feature, Zombies feels more like a quick diversion before returning to PvP or finishing the narrative.

And that's sort of the overriding problem with Vanguard: things don't always feel quite right. Zombies have been tweaked to make them more approachable, but it still lacks the components that make it worth playing over and over. The campaign's emphasis on individuals adds to the story's impact, but its attempts to convey the idea of playing as a variety of specialists frequently fall flat. Competitive multiplayer introduces a few changes to the main formula that make the game feel more dynamic, but they're mostly minor improvements.

The problem with Call of Duty games is that you very much know what you're getting with each annual iteration—and that's generally the case here. Vanguard, on the other hand, has both a blessing and a curse. Vanguard's concepts don't always mesh well with the series' framework, but they do feel like worthy contributions to the genre. That framework is still in place, and the campaign's good gunplay, fun multiplayer, and innovative moments are all worth finding out. But, at times, combining those two components reveals the flaws in Call of Duty: Vanguard, weakening both parts of the game rather than driving one to the fore.