Call of Duty Vanguard came out on Friday and that means like every year: Call of Duty weekend! For me that means manageable continuous action in the campaign and fun in the zombie mode in terms of ambition, for Alex it means multiplayer continuous battles and all together it’s what is perhaps the most consistently running game series of all time. Since 2003, a Call of Duty has been released every year. Without exception. Outside of sports series, that might be pretty unique. This year, it’s back to the trenches of World War II with Call of Duty Vanguard, which, by the way, Call of Duty visited a lot less often than you’d think: Besides Call of Duty WWII 2017, there were only three games in this war, namely the first three parts.

Call of Duty Vanguard – The campaign

So why does Vanguard’s story feel so used up? Probably because it does exactly nothing in terms of content that hasn’t happened before in this medium and especially movies. It’s been less than 12 hours since I finished the campaign and I already have to be careful not to mix things up here. Honestly, I feel like I more or less cross-consumed Vanguard, Battlefield V, Duel, Midway, The Dirty Dozen, and Inglorious Basterds yesterday.

You have a heavily constructed and poorly, as at best forced, executed frame story where the world’s first Special Forces commando team is squatting in a Nazi basement prison while upstairs Hitler is already torching the Fuhrerbunker. All loosely knit to the fact that the second-rate bad guy has a super-secret plan for how to keep the Reich going after Hitler. There they are interrogated one by one and tell their wild war stories. As previously mentioned, I had to boot up the Xbox again to make sure I didn’t accidentally find Das Dreckige Dutzend 2 in the shallows of Netflix, where clichés and platitudes shake hands. Let me take a quick look, not that there really is this movie sequel at the end…. Okay, technically there was no Dirty Dozen 2. But there was Dirty Dozen: Next Mission, The Deadly Mission, and The Fatal Mission. And from what I see here on Wikipedia, each of those had a more interesting plot than Vanguard.

But enough drifting. You have four relevant main characters. The first is Arthur Kingsley, the shirt-sleeved English leader of the dirty half-dozen, whose episode shows the Normandy landings, his failed jump behind enemy lines, and the advance against all odds and toward a massively fortified Nazi artillery position. Classic would be one word, I suppose, but the second half in particular feels like a remake of an old Call of Duty level that didn’t really deserve this refresh. At least the first half of the mission is more interesting, while you’re still alone and unarmed, but still deadly, marauding through the farm familiar from the trailers.

Here it becomes apparent that the first “gameplay” demo took a few liberties, or at least is very dependent on you catching all the triggers accurately. The stealth action shown earlier and the subsequent hand-to-hand combat in the house play out far more mundanely in the harsh reality of playing the game yourself. Instead of elegantly shooting through windows, ambushing Nazis at the door, and doing all the other cool things, you just blast through with headshots in 60 seconds and don’t think twice about it. The stupid dogs afterwards, which are basically target-seeking one-shot kills to your disadvantage, will stick in my mind longer.

After that, it’s off through Stalingrad with Polina Petrova. Here, the Vanguard allows itself a few minutes to show me the remains of her family. Her old father who taught her how to shoot, her brother who she has to look after. Deep cliché box, but nicely staged. Then the Nazi attack begins, a wild escape across the rooftops, you’re a wee bit surprised that Call of Duty has a good climbing mechanic, which it sadly uses far too little. Then Polina gets knocked out for a few hours. You wake up again in the night and this is where the strength of the levels with her shows. She’s much more agile, can quickly dive through vents and under tables, or just disappear up an uneven wall to another floor.

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It’s a well-done action stealth, where you take down a huge group of enemies in a defined area without quite falling into the usual Call of Duty baller rhythm. This is a really good action-stealth shooter that can be explored further in a spin-off. There are also some strong sniper sequences in Stalingrad, but unfortunately the boss fight doesn’t end in Duel: Enemy at the Gates, but more the equivalent of a knife fight in the pub. Well, what the heck, that was a fun couple of hours with Polina, off we go to the South Pacific.

The Battle for Midway begins with her US proto-hero Wade in the hangar. After two minutes you’re in the air and realize that Activision has put together a solid action flight sim here. Practically what we dreamed of back when we played Aces of the Pacific. After another three minutes you’re in the air battle, bombing an aircraft carrier with your own game mechanic, curving out Zeros and shooting them down. Great cinema, just great. After another four minutes, it’s over. I still can’t believe it. Someone builds an impeccable action sim that looks so good, works so well, and has all the necessary prerequisites to be its own game, and then ends it after a quarter of an hour at best.

I can tell you, I was crawling through the dense undergrowth of a tropical island pretty listlessly after the ensuing crash. Yes, the substantive point is clear to me, the Ace pilot Wade was to learn the dirty side of war on the ground. Well, based on the fact that he knifes Japanese soldiers like a Navy Seal, it seems like he’s not completely unfamiliar with it, for one thing, and for another, he and the game were more fun to be in the cockpit anyway. Nah well, another flak position has to be conquered. It will be done, but the fact that the game only shows the finale of this mission as a cutscene is a bit lazy.

I finally had direct flashbacks in the last chapter about the Australian blaster Riggs. An anti-authoritarian guy with a weird English accent blowing things up in North Africa…. I had just played that somewhere, hadn’t I? The colors even look very familiar…. Right! One of the episodes in Battlefield V is practically that, with slight variations in detail and a lot of freedom on an open battlefield. Here it’s the most inconsequential passage. A bit of sneaking through the desert, a few standard battles at small bases, the moderately staged tank battle of el-Alamein, where you don’t even get a tank yourself, doesn’t save much. It’s okay, nice WWII action, can be done for an hour.

Then finally follows the finale in burning Berlin, of which you don’t get to see much except the entrance to Tempelhof airport. Subway tunnels want to be cleaned of Nazis, it’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it. I actually only resent one thing about this finale, in which nothing happens in terms of content that you didn’t see coming from miles away. If a game drops a rocket launcher at my feet in the very last meters, then I damn well want to use it to nuke the head Nazi. But no, the script says otherwise, so enjoy the ending as it comes and ponder the next day why you watched The Dirty Dozen yesterday and that it wasn’t such a bad movie after all. Only to remember that the evening was called Call of Duty Vanguard.

It’s not that Vanguard doesn’t try hard gameplay-wise. The Midway flight sequence or Polina’s stealth excursions show enough approaches to turn them into a complete game. Absolute professionals were at work here to make it all look and work like that, only to pretend it never happened in the next chapter. And it’s truly not that the weapon feedback is bad. Hardly any shooter lets it rip under the trigger finger the way Call Of Duty does, and Vanguard is no exception. Sure, it makes mediocre stealth sequences like the one to Midway just bearable, but not fundamentally good. But most of the time it crashes very neatly. That’s the least you’d expect from the name.

Each of the four characters has their own special skill, which seems pretty underdeveloped with the exception of the Stalingrad campaign. Kingsley gets to give orders, which means you select one of a very few popping up points on the enemy and press a button to send your men there. This can be a machine gun nest, and since all NPC are largely useless, it’s usually better to take care of it yourself. Wade can’t use his flying talent on the ground, so he was given detective vision with super auto-aim for a few seconds. Sure, why not. Our Australian blaster is allowed to carry and switch through all kinds of grenades, the others are more limited. Story-technically important things they are allowed to blow up here and there, though, so this skill comes in rather halfway. As I said, not everything is brilliant, but a lot is already done really well and also very entertaining. And the best falls far short of what it could be. Whether that could be a mission-based flight sim or a pure Stalingrad stealth action campaign focused on a Russian renegade.

&No. 13;
But it’s not, and so you get the obligatory 6 to 7 hours of a potpourri that honestly also suffers a bit from the fact that just not everyone has a PS5 or a Series-X Xbox yet. The visuals are nice, the HDR is okay, there are nice effects here and there, and the level of detail is high, if you take the trouble to look. Call of Duty Vanguard looks good, without question. But with a few frames less, all of it would be possible even on the last generation of hardware. Vanguard is technically a bit less of a game changer than Cold War was, but it’s also safe to say that the new hardware can certainly do more if you didn’t still have to keep the old one in mind. That’s just the way it is with the generation change. So, it remains a sometimes ambitious, actually always entertaining campaign for Vanguard, because that’s what CoD always manages as the lowest denominator. If you don’t pay attention to the irrelevant – episodic – to ridiculous – frame story and take it as an old-fashioned WWII action flick, then it fits. I had my few hours of fun. I’ll have forgotten 97 percent of Call of Duty Vanguards campaign by next week.

Call of Duty Vanguard – The Zombies

&No. 13;
As far as the zombies go, I had high hopes. The giant level of the last Zombies was always downright impressive and cool in its own right, but a round always degenerated into quite a bit of work. So now an expanding hub level with portals to separate worlds, hey, that could speed up the loop and make it possible to play a round without taking an hour.

The good news is that at least this actually works. You start in the Stalingrad hub, which was already suspiciously well laid out. All the worlds you visit through the portals are campaign recycles in one way or another, and seem far more familiar than they should. And most importantly, the three game modes of Blitz, Transmit, and Rune Collect are very clearly defined. You know, always, what you have to do and it never takes more than five minutes. So it’s a solid, inconsequential PvE fun mode.

It’s just a shame that previous zombie modes have shown that this can be a somewhat time-consuming and not immediately self-explanatory, but very engaging baller experience. One that clearly sets itself apart from the other parts of the game with puzzles and switches. One that you have to get into, but is rewarded for it. An excellent co-op PvE game that has now practically earned its right to exist as an equal part of the CoD package. “The Beginning”, the title of this episode, is at best the superficial skeleton of what little there is to offer in terms of content and gameplay that could keep you here longer.

It is clear and has already been confirmed that Zombies will be expanded and extended over time, that the puzzles and other interesting elements, the hunt for the McGuffins and Easter Eggs should also be added. Fine, beautiful. Zombie fans who would buy Call of Duty Vanguard just for that can keep an eye on the development and jump in later. Everyone else will find a very cute little co-op here, which is more reminiscent of the first attempts in this direction. When zombies were really just a little joke on the side.

Call of Duty Vanguard – The Multiplayer

Alexander Bohn-Elias: On the multiplayer side, there’s basically only good things to report, even though everything might seem very familiar to friends and admirers of the series by now. The Call of Duty studios have collectively made a science out of turning the basic cycle of leveling up, upgrading, leveling up into the gameplay equivalent of a quick and repetitive sugar kick. It’s mostly empty calories, but it’s still good – for now, anyway.

The big differentiator this year is the choice of pace of play from “tactical” to “attack” to “blitz,” which basically just determines the number of players. Where I have to say that there’s a bit of window dressing here, because Blitz, in my opinion, can only really be used in very few modes and is mostly just messy and unsatisfying.

Here, someone on the team simply wondered “what if we throw too many players at the maps?”. Unfortunately, no one from the studio had the answer ready, which the game now gives as if by itself after just a round or two in this energetic but extremely cluttered way of playing Vanguard: At a certain point, it just gets too wild, and in my opinion, the Blitz variants simply overstep it too often. Getting killed every few seconds by someone who just wasn’t there (and then getting blown away a millisecond later) has nothing to do with combat dynamics. Fun for a few rounds, but all in all not good for more than 15 minutes of brain melting.

One of the things that mixes things up a bit and was, on balance, a good idea is, first of all, the MVP vote at the end, which highlights, as examples, three players who have put in extra effort and to whom everyone else is then allowed to give one vote each for a bonus. A small but nice idea that makes the whole procedure, which can often be a bit anonymous and non-committal in CoD, seem a bit more sociable.

That said, there are two modes that are the stars of the show this year. Besides the always whimsical team deathmatches and the two conquest modes (sometimes with three hold points in Domination, sometimes with one that changes steadily in Hardpoint and “Position” respectively), I had the most fun in Champion Hill and Patrol. Champion Hill brings a lot of the cramped, ticket-scarcity-defined tension of Gunfight mode, but finds a way for significantly more players to compete at once in a last-team standing. It’s really cool and exciting to see a total of 16 or 24 players in two or three-man teams battling it out on four small maps at once until one team has breathed its 12 or 18 lives respectively.

Each round is brief before teams are redrawn and put on a different of the four battlefields. Pick up a little money and body armor here and there, upgrade your chosen rifle at the press of a button, and every three rounds you have 30 seconds to purchase new killstreaks or otherwise gear in a ceasefire zone. I like the mode a lot, even if I do need a break from it after an hour or two. But that also speaks to the intensity, even if it is dull.

A little more in the direction of wasteful annihilation battle goes the patrol, which in a sense is position (hardpoint), if the zone to be held would move incessantly around the map. Again, this is an interesting way to play this sort of conquest-based multiplayer match, where a team that’s been trained on each other can do a good job of preemptively securing dangerous pinholes or wide lines of sight before the enemy does. But even with randoms, the mode comes across as dynamic and driving. That’s hard to get right – as long as it’s not Blitz, because, as I said, that’s just “too much”.

So the big surprises are missing, but I’d be lying if I claimed that Vanguard doesn’t actually do something more than the bare minimum on the multiplayer side to keep regular buyers of this series happy. At the same time, on the progression side, at some point it starts to feel a little too much like you’ve unlocked an ACOG equivalent for the twelfth time. You know what you’re getting when you get a Call of Duty. For better or for worse.

Call of Duty Vanguard Test – The Conclusion

So those are the components of the Call of Duty: Vanguard package. How does it do? Well, how can a game whose credits last about 8 minutes and hand out a trophy for managing to look at them not be well-styled enough not to offer at least the usual fun. Vanguard manages to do that flawlessly, too. You can tell in every minute that these massive development teams have been doing this for decades in some cases, know every move and can get lost in pointless visual details, like putting a big battle in the right frame for once. It’s routine for these people and that’s how it feels. Routine on a high quality level.

Yeah, I wasn’t taken with the campaign, but that’s Vanguard’s own ambitions to blame. It keeps showing you minutes and minutes of what else could actually be in here. It’s like you’re being given a toy that’s different and at least as cool as the one you’ve known forever. But after you’ve spent a few enthusiastic minutes with it, they take it away and give you back the old one. It’s great too, but I wasn’t done with the new one yet!

And to reiterate: Even though nothing here could knock my socks off, Vanguard offers impeccable staging, finely honed, massive gunplay, and a plot that, while unconvincing, serves its purpose as a vehicle to carry the action. If Vanguard didn’t show anything itself so often that it could be more than a rock-solid WWII shooting gallery, I’d probably be more enthusiastic.

The disappointment currently is the zombie mode, unfortunately. Its ideas for a faster loop aren’t fundamentally wrong, and they do what they’re supposed to. But unfortunately, the scope is currently rather manageable, to say the least, and most importantly, it lacks practically everything that made Zombie a truly independent co-op PvE experience that has its raison d’être not only within the CoD package, but as a gaming highlight in its own right.

The multiplayer does much better, even if it ends up being very familiar. But that’s just the curse and blessing of a great series. What you get is familiar and polished, but also very familiar. But not bad, because Champion Hill and Patrol shine as mode highlights and can inspire for quite a while. At least until the generally not wrong idea of Blitz to send more players to a small map for an extra dose of chaos is polished a bit more.

Call of Duty: Vanguard is, in the end, another Call of Duty. Nothing more, nothing less. Multiplayer fans buy it. Zombie fans wait to see what happens next. And those who are looking for two evenings of WWII action cinema of the more insignificant kind with occasional touches of playful adventurousness will be well served here. Good game, good shooter. I’ll forget I played it by Christmas. At least Cold War lingered a few months more.