Welcome to our review of Call of Duty: Vanguard, this is finally your chance to be the tip of the spear in the fight against World War II villains!
Call of Duty: Vanguard consists of three parts, Campaign, Multiplayer, and Zombie mode. In campaign, you will experience influential battles of World War II as you fight for victory across multiple theaters of war. The Call of Duty®: Vanguard campaign will immerse you in a deeply engaging and gripping character-driven narrative experience featuring combat on an unparalleled global scale, while also telling the harrowing stories of those who turned the tides of war and changed history forever.
Multiplayer: Become the vanguards of the changing face of war as you make your mark across Call of Duty’s signature core gunplay and Multiplayer experience.
Zombies: Prove your mettle as you try to survive the relentless onslaught of the undead in a chilling new Zombies experience, developed by Treyarch Studios.
The Campaign is my first time really investing time in a Call of Duty game, sure I had partaken in several free CoD weekends, but those being mostly for putting the hurt on zombies or unsuspecting random fiends in multiplayer mode. I always remember that this game is definitely not bad or so, it just never ticked all the right boxes for me. I felt like it was missing something to really get me into the game and well, I will admit straight from the get-go that Vanguard did not really persuade me based upon the initial gameplay shown and the game was just barely pre-ordered a while back due to my backlog getting empty.
Having received a review code, I was kind of relieved because I was a little reluctant to buy this game at full price. I am being honest here, this game was not very high on my wishlist, but well, I have mixed feelings about Vanguard and hope to properly convey them all. In the campaign, you play as several unknown heroes, gathered from all over the world in order to go on a top-secret mission. They get caught and as the story unfolds, you are each time playing a different part of our heroes. Each has its own advantages like an ace pilot, a nurse-turned warrior called Polina (Lady Nightingale), and so on.
Lady Nightingale actually is the most captivating of the storylines in my humble opinion and I just applaud the really good storyline, the amazing voice work, and just the entire feeling of being submerged in the action… Lady Polina is the best. How she becomes colder and colder as more of her family does not survive the war, her hatred for the Germans is real and you just really get to experience her pain and suffering. A big kudos here to her voice actor, who is not the only one doing a top-notch job though, the guy playing the German officer, damn, he made me hate his character, which I in turn really enjoy.
Now aside from the story, which you really SHOULD experience yourself, let me talk game mechanics because those will explain my relatively low score. The AI of the enemies is really dumb. I often was able to just walk up to the side of shooting enemies without even being noticed. No need to sneak around or anything, I just walked next to them and plunged a knife in their throats. I did this quite often and at times where I was in possession of a sniper rifle, I just went all out and had mindless target practice.
At other times, like when I was playing the game in front of a gamer friend, I kept getting sniped because it was unclear I had to mindlessly follow one of my friends, leading to being right below the sniper, which led me to take him out. At that time, we both just went WTF from being surprised as to how to play that part. The game is just unclear at times and I took a few needless kills if those would have been better balanced or informed.
Another thing I noticed is in the graphics department, despite how good some of the game looks, it also has some weird choices. I was in non-moving grass at one point and taking a step back just made the grass reappear the exact same way it was before. Several times, the game acted like this and it just surprises me that the highs and lows of the game are just lightyears apart.
While I did not really play a ton of zombies or multiplayer, those are what you’d expect from any Call of Duty game. I actually ate a few bags of potato chips just to get a few hours of double XP so I could level up, so I am guessing the PR department will be happy to see customers actually going for those bags of crisps just to play a game.
In conclusion, Call of Duty: Vanguard is a game of a perfect storyline with Miss Polina, my new hero of gaming for the time being and an overall clunky experience otherwise. Based upon the campaign mostly, this is my score.
