Call of Duty: Vanguard is a story of three games. How sometimes several of the pillars lift the package – and one lowers it. Vanguard’s campaign is weak, but multiplayer and zombies carry the title to victory. Let’s break down each experience.
We’ll get the gross out of the way first; The campaign is ambitious and nice in scope, and takes players to several key locations including Stalingrad, the Pacific, and even North Africa. While this shows excellent environmental diversity and its throbbing soundtrack gets the blood pumping, everything about these elements stays in the doldrums. As the narrative jumps from scene to scene, none of the characters have any weight whatsoever. They are pieces of lifeless cardboard that don’t even reach the one-note-action movie stage.
These characters are placed in boring segments that are as boring as possible and formulaic with no real opportunity to shine. While large arenas full of opponents are nothing new to Call of Duty, getting involved in the non-arena segments is even more tedious. There’s no such thing as a cool ruse mission to break up the monotony, just chores that require you to beg to just clean up another kill room. It’s a shame because some of these scenarios and characters feel like they should have been slam dunks.
Vanguard has all the trappings of a ready-made The enemy is at the gate Sniper vs. Sniper Scenario. Unfortunately, it drops the ball and delivers arena after arena full of junk to kill without ever realizing that sniper fantasy. You’ll have to run under desks battling an endless barrage of flashes of light as you climb rocks and walls. Incredibly annoying trial-and-error stealth segments are juxtaposed with bombastic action sequences in a shocking way. I found it puzzling that one of the characters in the game basically has superhero powers that allow them to see enemies through view-obstructing landscapes and, if necessary, to automatically aim using a combination of god sight and bullet time. The multitude of scenarios and segments looks beautiful, but the good looks cannot save this trip.
The narrative never decides whether to stay grounded in the harsh realities of World War II or get hard on your nerves, with absurd caricatures of lamenting villains who would be more at home in a bad comic. This dissonance is pronounced, bizarre, and runs through the lifeblood of the entire experience. Call of Duty campaigns tend to go from weird to spectacular to emotionally resonant – this one is not one of them and is easy to skip. I’ll be amazed how that campaign made a vengeful sniper scenario feel like you would get stuck in traffic for years to come.
Multiplayer is successful, but not because of the addition of weapons, super slides, or jetpack mechanics. The key to getting it online is having some extremely powerful decision-making tools on top of what is already best-in-class shots and adjustments. The most powerful device for the core systems is the addition of a combat pacing controller. With Combat Pacing you can influence the number of players and the time until the use of all of your preferred activities. This probably seems like a small thing, but it’s great because you can choose exactly the type of multiplayer matches you want, in addition to the main game modes like Kill Confirmed, Hardpoint, or Domination. When I felt like throwing a bunch of grenades while packing a shotgun loaded with incendiary ammunition, I chose Blitz mode, which provides instant action with almost instant time to deployment. If I wanted something that I might not see a player right away and had time to aim a rifle before I was shot, the tactical pace was perfect. Even if you don’t want to turn the dials, Assault is a great standby mode for standard Call of Duty multiplayer.
Combat pacing is subtle, but bigger than any of the new multiplayer offerings. Still, Vanguard has a handful of new modes. Patrol provides a movable hardpoint for protection, but it “patrols” a map, and Champion Hill offers players some little gimmicks to get involved in. Champion Hill is a kind of advancement of the Gunfight mode with more player selection and many teams playing tournament style at the same time. Choosing the path to victory over purchases in the hub and taking on other teams for life and money has a different feel to petty skirmishes, and I enjoyed it. Of course, the gunsmith offers a multitude of options for the multiplayer mode, with which you can tweak any weapon to your heart’s content, right through to ammunition types for that little extra bang.
Last but not least is Zombies that Treyarch designed. The studio’s undead intuition rarely misses the mark, and Call of Duty: Vanguard is ready to bring zombies down a fantastic road. This iteration is a bit of a rogue zombie dungeon crawl, and that’s pretty awesome. With hints of the current Outbreak mode, players will be tasked with defeating a demonic being while using their own unearthly powers, including rings of fire and icy doom that can be used to conjure a blizzard. All the fun zombies like Pack-A-Punch, Mystery Box and other upgrades are served hub style in a base where players hang out between missions. Don’t be fooled if you think you’re about to take a break in town; Zombies mode is as fast-paced as ever with a neon arcade action glow and tweaked upgrades to keep you in the action.
With your team, choose from a selection of classic shooter activities that include escorting a magical object, surviving until the clock runs out, or slaughtering enemies for drops. We have seen many of these elements before, but they are arranged in an incredibly powerful way. For example, I appreciated the lack of tedious travel time in Outbreak – click a portal and you’re on to the next task. Special skills acquired and leveled up according to portals can make significant changes to your equipment. Essentially, Vanguard distills a lot of the cool stuff about zombies into one compact package and then spreads cool jokes and dialogues. Fortunately, you can still throw monkey bombs. In the version I played, however, there was nothing that beat the story with Easter eggs; these are expected to arrive with season 1.
Call of Duty: Vanguard’s campaign misses the mark, but multiplayer and zombies are doing the heavy lifting to put the title in a good spot. If you’re the most invested in the single player experience, you can pass this year’s entry on, but if you’re into the other modes, Call of Duty remains an excellent choice for gunfights, looting, and zombie executions.
