Call of Duty: Vanguard – Review
After more than 20 years, videogames are finally emerging from the shadow of Spielberg’s film, Saving Private Ryan. This is the first Call of Duty game to be set in the Second World War, but it’s the sixth in the long-running FPS series to be set in the Second World War. Some of Vanguard’s bold moves don’t pan out, and they play it safe in other areas. Sledgehammer, on the other hand, has managed to bring WWII back to life as a setting – and that’s a good thing.
Pros:
Looks great
Interesting characters and setting
Excellent gameplay
Fun multiplayer
Zombies is a blast
Solid performance across the board
Cons:
Zombies needs to be fleshed out more
Score – 8.5/10
Allow yourself to marvel at how strange, yet ingrained Call of Duty is in the year 2021. Since the label “Call of Duty” has been splashed across a staggering array of different experiences, the phrase “I’m going to play Call of Duty” has long since become ambiguous, as it all somehow connects to the massive, shared world of Call of Duty: Warzone. It’s an alternate reality with its own timeline and history, a metaverse made of sugar and caffeine-infused hyperviolence. There are Zombies roaming the land, and Cold War-era spies are attempting to stop the nuclear holocaust.
More than any Ken Burns-style documentary footage, Vanguard’s pulpy campaign is informed by Warzone’s madcap goofiness. It’s a comic book origin storey for a team of commandos that would have fit right in with Clint Eastwood’s Where Eagles Dare, so Activision’s “birth of the Special Forces” stuff is mostly a hoax.
Campaign
In the final days of World War II, the storey begins on a train outside of Hamburg. A British paratrooper, Arthur Kingsley, has been dispatched with a team of hardened soldiers to steal a Nazi plan known as Operation Phoenix out of a sub-pen as the Red Army closes in on Berlin. Weasely Nazi officer Jannick Richter interrogates them one-by-one in a cell beneath the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, where the entire gang is imprisoned (played by an unnervingly restrained Dominic Monaghan).
In their sessions with Richter, each character has a starting point for their introduction stories. On D-Day, Arthur is dropped into Merville, where he and his comrades take on a complex of coastal artillery. Next, we head to Stalingrad to learn more about the group’s Russian sniper, Polina Petrova, who is on a mission of revenge. During the Battle of Midway, we learn more about Wade Jackson, and Lucas Riggs, an explosives expert from Australia, shows up in North Africa.
Games tend to shy away from depicting Nazis for a variety of reasons that are understandable but not laudable. Videogame Nazis are usually bad because they enjoy gloating while torturing prisoners, or because they are interested in evil occult practises like reanimating the dead (more on that later). Sledgehammer’s writers deserve credit for depicting their villains as disgusting racists, whereas Vanguard avoids any mention of the Holocaust. In the interrogation room, Richter boasts about Hitler’s personal recommendation of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, an American eugenicist and white supremacist. This isn’t subtle or shoehorned in; both Richter and his menacing boss express open contempt for Arthur’s ethnicity.
Generally speaking, the missions are among the best in recent memory. Long, multi-phased adventures that traverse a variety of environments, often beginning in a quiet, stealthy mode, then ratcheting up the volume and allowing you to go loud with a full platoon. It’s a bust in areas where it can’t compete with Call of Duty’s usual reach. Airborne dogfighting at Midway feels more like a battle with my mouse, while a boss fight in which I have to sneak attack a heavily armed character in a maze of dusty rooms has me checking my watch rather than creeping toward the edge of my seat..
These are minor hiccups in an otherwise exhilarating campaign that left me eager for more in a long time. As always, it’s short, and the way it ends suggests that the team’s greatest adventures lie ahead. RTX-powered ray-traced lighting is absent from Sledgehammer, and characters’ faces appear softer than in Black Ops – Cold War and Modern Warfare. Vanguard’s cast, on the other hand, has a much more friendly and likeable personality, making it easier to root for them.
Special abilities can be used at specific points in the campaign by each character. Allies can be directed to half-track turrets and machine gun nests by Arthur’s “command,” while Wade can use his “focus,” a temporary aimbot, to slow down the action and automatically kill enemy troops.
Multiplayer
The addition of a gun, super-slide, or jetpack mechanic has no effect on multiplayer’s success. On top of its already top-notch shooting and customising, the online offering relies on some extremely impactful decision tools. The Combat Pacing dial is the most significant addition to the core systems. You have control over the number of players and the time it takes for them to engage in any activity using Combat Pacing. Even though this may seem like an inconsequential feature, it’s actually very useful because you can choose exactly the type of multiplayer match you want, in addition to the core game modes like Kill Confirmed or Hardpoint. Blitz mode, with its near-instantaneous time-to-engagement, was my go-to option when I felt like hurling grenades and carrying a shotgun loaded with incendiary ammo. Using Tactical pacing allowed me to play a game where I might not immediately see a player and had time to aim a rifle before being shot. You can use Assault even if you don’t want to fiddle with the controls in Call of Duty multiplayer.
The subtlety of the combat pacing is more important than any of the new multiplayer features. There are a few new modes in Vanguard, however. As a mobile Hardpoint, Patrol can “patrol” a map, whereas Champion Hill allows players to engage in more localised antics. In Champion Hill, the Gunfight mode evolves into a tournament-style mode with more player choice and multiple teams competing at once. Small-scale skirmishing has a different feel when you buy your way to victory by making purchases in the hub and fighting other teams for lives and money. If you’re playing with others, the gunsmith gives you a ton of options for customising your weapons, including ammunition types for a little extra oomph.
Zombies
The Zombies mode in Vanguard is the game’s biggest surprise to me. After a brief hiatus, Treyarch returns to Zombies in Der Anfang with a streamlined approach, making it easier to consume than in previous Call of Duty games. Afterward, you’ll enter a haunted Stalingrad fountain square where you’ll engage in some light objective-based zombie-blasting for a couple of minutes. Your team will warp back to the square, where they can upgrade their weapons at the Pack-A-Punch machine and drink from demonic chalices to boost stats like reload speed and critical damage. They can then clear out more enemies and explore the newly opened areas.
Although Der Anfang is still a lot of mechanics on paper, I never felt like I was dragging my team down because I didn’t know all of the rules. Missions must be accepted by a majority of your team before you can enter another portal, and you can leave at any time after completing five of them. It’s a fast-paced, breezy game at first, but once you’ve completed the initial rounds, the difficulty quickly increases.
‘Franchise-first’: Der Anfang has a direct connection to the main campaign. Though Project Aether is mentioned in a cutscene, the fact that Vanguard’s World War II setting is paired with the B-movie horror of its zombie mode is what makes it work so well.
Performance
Call of Duty once again nails it in delivering stellar visuals and set pieces, while performing well across the board. Everything from a base PS4 to a high end PC, the framerate is stable and the visual scaling is extremely well done. We played on a base PS4 and were surprised as to how well the game help up at 30fps and still felt really smooth – no small feat when PiP scopes are concerned. On PC, everything was locked tight at 1440p and 144fps, be it big explosions, chase sequences, shootouts, or even the casual walk and talk.
Verdict
Vanguard appears to be a conscious acknowledgement of the fact that the reverential, Americana-drenched tones of Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers don’t fit Call of Duty’s core strengths. With Vanguard’s ferocious sensibilities, it is a far more enjoyable experience from start to finish than Call of Duty: WWII slavishly derivative.
Of course, we’ll have to wait and see what happens. When the new Pacific map for Warzone launches in December, the map pool will grow from 20 to 24 by the end of the year. It is impossible to know how Vanguard will affect the larger Call of Duty ecosystem (with Shipment making its return November 17, and three new multiplayer maps arriving alongside Season One). When Caldera replaces Verdansk ’84, new Vanguard weapons will be introduced, and there will be a new mystery on the island to investigate.
In the meantime, Call of Duty: Vanguard is the most enjoyable of the three new games in the Call of Duty series (which now share a unified launch screen alongside Warzone). I’d recommend Vanguard over Modern Warfare or Black Ops – Cold War if I had to pick just one of the three. There aren’t many surprises to be found.
