2/5 ★ – UpwardBoss's review of Call of Duty: Vanguard.

Call of Duty Vanguard is a rare miss for the franchise. Its multiplayer's core gameplay is still good (mostly), and it does have some interesting ideas, but a lack of commitment to the setting, along with a bad campaign and the worst Zombies mode the franchise has ever seen *seriously* holds back this package as a whole. Campaign: I'm a sucker for Call of Duty campaigns. I love them. They're usually one of the highlights of my year. Unfortunately Call of Duty Vanguard's campaign is not good. Beyond the game's campaign itself feeling incredibly tired and overplayed at this point, especially so soon after CoD WWII, the narrative itself is weak, with almost the entire game taking place with the characters telling their backstories with flashbacks while in prison, which conveniently coincides with major battles in the war. HOW CONVENIENT. The missions themselves are a mixed bag. While the ground Pacific mission and the two North Africa missions are standouts, the others aren't great. The final mission is pretty good, but feels unearned because there's no narrative buildup. The two Stalingrad missions were very buggy (we'll get to that), the opening mission's lighting seemed very off, the second mission was a boring D-Day rehash that we've seen hundreds of times, and the Midway plane mission had some of the worst controls I've ever played in my life. Let's talk about the bugs. This campaign has a lot of them. From unfinished animations like when you get killed by a bayonet, to much more serious bugs, like takedowns not working during a boss fight that relies on them, or getting stuck in a wall and then getting a checkpoint, meaning that the only way to get out of that wall is to restart the ENTIRE level. Not ideal 20 minutes in. In the end, despite 3 standout missions, Vanguard's campaign is disappointing, and a major step back from Modern Warfare (2019) and Black Ops Cold War, and even the average CoD WWII from 2017, and doesn't even get close to the franchise best Call of Duty 2, also set in World War II. 3.5/10. Multiplayer: Multiplayer fares a lot better, although there are still some problems. Multiplayer features 19 maps (16 at launch, with 3 added on later) 9 modes, two new (Champion Hill and Patrol), 6 classic modes that have been franchise staples for a while, and one mode added in December, a month after launch, which while not completely new, was recently introduced in Black Ops 4 (more on that later). Let's start with the new modes. Champion Hill is very reminiscent of Gunfight, first introduced in Modern Warfare. I LOVED that mode, and this mode isn't as good, but it's still fun, focusing on 2v2 (or 1v1 or 3v3 in variants of the mode) gunfights that are tense and very different from traditional multiplayer. I miss the one life nature of Gunfight though. Before we continue on with the rest of the modes I should explain a feature this game has. There wasn't a need to explain this before now as it's not relevant to Champion Hill. Vanguard multiplayer has a feature called "combat pacing" which will adjust the player count based on the size of the map and mode selected, be it "Tactical" (lol), "Assault", or "Blitz". The issue here is you can't just queue up for one mode. You can only select a "preference", which defeats the point. Anyway, moving on to Patrol, it's very reminiscent of Hardpoint, almost to the point of feeling like a copy, just with the point moving constantly instead of once a minute. Not a fan of it. It feels gimmicky and a new mode for the sake of a new mode. I didn't enjoy playing this mode. The other 6 modes are your standard traditional CoD modes, Free-for-All, Hardpoint, Search & Destroy, Kill Confirmed, Domination, and of course Team Deathmatch. These are all solid, of course, they're mainstays for a reason, and are very fun, with the exception of Kill Confirmed, which is a mode I'm usually a big fan of, but here it's not good as they removed the ability to see how many tags you denied, removing a huge part of knowing how well you did. Same with not being able to see your deaths *while playing*, but you can see that in the menu screen after the match at least. Also while Free-for-All is great in Blitz and Assault combat pacing, I do not recommend playing it on Tactical, as the lack of players results in some really boring matches. Moving on to the final mode, added in Season One in December, Control was a mode originally introduced in Black Ops 4, brought back in Black Ops Cold War, and makes its third appearance here. While I played a lot of those games, I hadn't played much of Control specifically. The mode itself is a limited lives mode (30 lives per round for each team) where the offense tries to capture two points, and the defense tries to stop them. This mode is great, and one of the highlights of the game in my opinion. The limited lives aspect makes each round tense, and it's something different for CoD which I liked. There's a Hardcore variant available for each of the above modes except for Champion Hill and Control, which gives you limited health, friendly fire, and no HUD. Doesn't change much EXCEPT in Domination, which can make it chaotic. Not like Black Ops 4 where the time to kill is so high in that game normally that Hardcore is closer to the standard CoD experience. Bugs and glitches, like in the campaign, is a major issue here. Multiple server crashes, killstreaks bugging out, and aim assist problems. Especially the aim assist problems. Aim assist in this game... is bugged... I think? if not it's just far, far too strong and needs to be drastically turned down. It genuinely just looks like you're getting killed by hackers. And no, this is not the same level of aim assist CoD has usually had. It's way, way stronger. I think it's a bug. Beyond that there's the lack of commitment to the setting. Call of Duty has never been realistic, but in the past it has made an effort to be immersive (outside of Zombies because that's always been the silly spinoff mode). Vanguard makes absolutely no effort in this regard. From laser guns to Attack on Titan skins, the game clearly is more focused on selling cosmetic microtransactions than being an immersive World War II game. In the end, there's a lot to like about Vanguard's multiplayer, but there's a lot of issues at the moment and I'd say there's better Call of Duty games out there on the multiplayer side. As it is though, it's not bad. 7/10. Zombies: Okay, so I'm not a big Zombies guy. Only time I really got invested in it was Black Ops 4. So I'm admittedly not the best person to ask regarding this side of the franchise. And it's important to remember that Sledgehammer Games didn't make the Zombies mode here. Treyarch did. Presumably not the main team either so soon after Black Ops Cold War. But, when I heard the Zombies community near-universally lambasting Vanguard Zombies as a lazy cash grab, I knew what to expect. And they were right. Vanguard's Zombies is atrocious. Unlike traditional Zombies maps, which feature round-based gameplay where you kill hordes of zombies while progressing through the level and opening it up more, Vanguard's Der Anfang map is a hub area with a series of small areas where you complete objectives. Sound familiar? (Rainbow Six Extraction intensifies). Worse, the game only had 3 objective types at launch (with two more added in later), Blitz, which requires you to hold off against enemies until a timer expires, Harvest, which requires you to kill enemies until they drop "Runestones" and then place it into a "Sin Eater" (whatever that means), and Transmit, which requires you to escort and orb to the end of the level. So boring. They did add in two later. One of which is Purge, which requires you to capture as many zones as you can within two minutes. If you don't, (and you almost certainly won't), you need to kill the enemies that spawn (the number of enemies that spawn depend on the number of runes you capture so I don't believe you're actually supposed to capture them all). Also boring. The last one is Void. This one drops you in to the classic World at War Zombies map Shi No Numa for some classic round based zombies action, sounds great right? Well no, because you still need to complete at least two rounds of the other boring modes to get to that mode, and the playable area is also only the starting room. Such a disappointment. There also was no Easter Egg at launch, and only a mini easter egg added in Season One, which again speaks to the lack of content on offer here. In the end, Vanguard's Zombies is a disaster. There's basically nothing redeemable about it other than "the gunplay is good", which applies to basically every CoD ever. 2/10. One final thing I want to note is the RICOCHET anti-cheat on PC, which is a kernel-level rootkit. Now, there was a major controversy regarding Valorant's anti-cheat being a similar kernel-level anti-cheat when that game released back in 2020. Vanguard's release mostly slipped under the radar for PC gamers, mostly due to the lack of interest in the title, so conversation on this wasn't so widespread, so I'll redirect you to this article here (https://www.engadget.com/valorant-vanguard-riot-games-security-interview-video-170025435.html) Long story short, while I fully support anti-cheat efforts, there are other effective anti-cheat efforts that are nowhere near as threatening to your computer's security, and if you decide to buy this game (which at this point I think you can already tell I do not recommend regardless) I STRONGLY advise you purchase it on a console instead of PC. Also there are still hackers in Vanguard and Warzone so this whole thing is pointless. In the end, Vanguard has a mostly good multiplayer, with solid maps and modes (mostly), but is held back by bugs and a lack of commitment to the setting, and the overall package is held back by a bad campaign and a terrible Zombies mode. Campaign: 3.5/10 Multiplayer: 7/10 Zombies: 2/10 Overall final score: 4/10