In the last 4 years since Sledgehammer Games released Call of Duty: WWII, Activision's perennial shooter series has undergone its most massive transformation since 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The rise of Warzone from 2023's Modern Warfare reboot has necessitated that every annual Cod game no more be the standalone product, but as the following appendage of the complex, overarching platform.
Nowhere is this more obvious with Call of Duty: Vanguard than you are on the primary menu screen, that is split into equal fourths: one sliver reserved for Vanguard, one for Warzone, one for Black Ops Cold War, and one for Modern Warfare.
It's difficult to picture this release strategy not impacting the developers’ creative decisions in some capacity. Instead of each Call of Duty game servicing the fans' demands and their own ambitions, they now must also service Warzone's particular demands, too-namely in how it's used to sell microtransactions, but additionally on a gameplay level. The first game to have to do so was Cold War, and also the integration of this game's content into the Warzone ecosystem nearly broke the billions-earning free-to-play title. Vanguard, having learned from the predecessor, seems poised for that transition, but it's also forced the sport to make some questionable creative choices, especially for a global War II Call of Duty title.
Listen, I do not care if Vanguard-a World War II shooter-is historically accurate or not. I've always felt that Call of Duty did an admirable job at portraying the “greatest hits” of World War II's battles from the perspectives of normal infantry soldiers, but even so you will find limitations to how much reverence for sacrifice a video game can have. (Besides, the way that some people cry about how exactly weapons along with other various machinations of death come in variations of media can border on the fetishistic. Do I think The second world war weapons are cool? Yes. Am I going to get upset whenever a U.S. soldier fires an MP40? No. I can't be arsed to care much.)
With that in mind, the way in which Vanguard needs to bend over backwards to fit its World War II fiction in to the obligations of Warzone is downright comical. This is most obvious within the game's multiplayer, specifically using its Gunsmith, that has now appeared for the third year in a row and will continue to appear so long as Warzone requires it. The Gunsmith designed a large amount of sense when it debuted in 2023's Modern Warfare, as modern military weapons are much more modular than their historical counterparts. In Vanguard, the modifications that Gunsmith allows you to make are so absurdly ahistorical that they kind of circle all the way to being cool. Like, can you even tell what popular World War II gun this is said to be?
Or this?
The other area where Vanguard's multiplayer is making obvious concessions to Warzone's need to feed the microtransaction monster is within its Operators. When Modern Warfare introduced Operators as a way to drive microtransactions, their inclusion still made sense inside the multiplayer's fiction. Both Modern Warfare and Cold War had Operators that served on each side of the conflict the games presented because, for whatever reason, it's still socially acceptable to create KGB agents (who're Cold War's “bad guys”) look cool. Vanguard, perhaps learning a lesson from Battlefield V, has steered from making Nazis customizable and opted instead to not include them within the game's multiplayer at all.
Considering Sledgehammer's obligation to make Vanguard's character models monetizable, that's undoubtedly the smart decision. However, this means you now have Allied soldiers killing Allied soldiers during small skirmishes in World War II-adjacent locations, with players utilizing the same character models no matter what side they're on. Does it impact gameplay? Yes, it does, only to a small extent, considering enemy players have giant red name tags over their heads. Moreso, it breaks the fiction that World War II was fought between your Allies and also the Axis, which is possibly going a step too far.
None of the makes Vanguard's multiplayer less fun than any other Cod game, but it does make it feel cheaper. If previous The second world war -themed Call of Duty games at least appeared primarily motivated through the desire to faithfully translate war into a game, Vanguard feels primarily motivated because when The second world war is sensible inside the Warzone platform.
Perhaps more surprising is when this attitude of Vanguard functioning essentially as new wallpaper for Warzone has wormed its distance to the game's campaign. Because Vanguard must sell its Operators as action figures to decorate up, its story needs characters who could stick out as individuals.
That's where members of the titular proto special ops group come in. British lieutenant Arthur Kingsley, American hotshot pilot Wade Jackson, Soviet sniper Polina Petrova, and Aussie demolitions expert Lucas Riggs seem to tick off every box in the “ragtag group of badasses” checklist. Arthur is the stoic, loyal leader who, as a black man in a position of power, constantly must prove himself around the world, although not to his friends. Wade is an egomaniac with the skills to support it who has to learn how to work as a team. Lucas is rough around the edges, but he's as reliable anyone and damn proficient at blowing stuff up. And sharpshooter Polina has an insatiable thirst for revenge after Nazis killed her whole family.
As obvious as many these characters are, they're still functional in their respective roles. None of them particularly stick out, however they are all generally likable (aside from maybe Wade). The issue, however, may be the way in which Sledgehammer's writers have structured Vanguard's campaign around them. Essentially, the whole team spends most of the game's story in a jail cell in Berlin, taking turns getting interrogated with a sniveling Nazi officer. The gameplay scenarios, therefore, center on each team member's backstory and just how they came to join Vanguard. It makes sense a story that is utterly without stakes, where exciting moments feel hollow because they completely lack sense at all of dramatic tension, where boring moments are devastating towards the pacing because there's no sense the payoff is going to be worth it.
That does mean that, despite the fact that Vanguard should be the team that takes on the weirder, most classified missions to subvert the Third Reich, you will still be visiting probably the most played-out The second world war scenarios-with a twist. As Arthur, you're still storming the beaches during D-Day, but this time you're among the soldiers who lands before everybody else to sabotage Nazi artillery. So that as Wade, you're still flying within the Battle of Midway, however, you also crash behind enemy lines and have to survive in the Japanese jungle. The ending obviously sets up a sequel in which the story will in fact concentrate on Vanguard's mission instead of just using it as a backdrop for any number of flashbacks, but I found it hard to care, since I basically felt like I possibly could have been playing any World War II game at that point.
As much as Vanguard appears to exist to serve Warzone, will still be a fun game, and all of the compelling progression the latter titles have introduced exists in Vanguard. While the multiplayer’s two new modes-Patrol and Champion Hill-probably won't leave their marks the way in which Modern Warfare's Gunfight did, they're fine inclusions in the series' classic offerings. Really, the best part about Vanguard's multiplayer may be the new Combat Pacing system, which dynamically adjusts the amount of players in a server based on the map and mode. For someone who likes at least a little bit of room to breathe, I generally preferred the slower Tactics pacing, though every so often it’s fun to use Assault or Blitz for any little more chaos.
The third a part of Vanguard is its co-op Zombies mode, and I suspect this is the most controversial for longtime fans. Vanguard's Zombies mode feels much more casual than previous entries, especially at launch. Here, Stalingrad functions as a main hub of sorts, that you can start quick missions, upgrade your weapons, and refill your ammo. You need to reach a certain threshold of missions completed in to exfiltrate from Stalingrad and win the round, however, you may also decide to keep going.
It's not at all as compelling or detailed as previous Zombies modes, but it is still fun for someone like me who never spent that much time with Call of Duty Zombies in the first place. Still, I suspect that diehard Zombies players will feel underwhelmed by the challenge and depth (or lack thereof) this year's iteration has to offer. Sledgehammer developers have stated that “Der Anfang,” the name of the Zombies campaign, is only the beginning of exactly what Zombies will have to offer (the name literally means “the beginning”), but sounding what we should have right, it feels more like a fast and simple method to gain levels weapons and Operators than the usual fully fleshed-out mode.
I suppose it's a challenge to drum up excitement every year for any new Cod title, but Vanguard appeared like a particularly difficult one for Activision's PR team. (In fact, I didn't even receive my review code before the day the sport launched.) While an awesome, alternate take on the standard The second world war theme would appear like a no-brainer for a series like Call of Duty, that doesn't appear to be the focus in Vanguard. Instead, the 2010 title appears to primarily work as an addendum to Warzone, that has all but consumed the series from which it spun off. If you view Vanguard as an expansion to the Call of Duty platform, it will its job. But because a standalone title, Vanguard feels haunted through the ghost of the series' past, when Cod used to create compelling World War II games.
