There is something about Call Of Duty: Vanguard and the multiplayer modes feel slim. Like my time with campaign of the game, I also want. This is a World War II veneer overlaid on a Modern War canvas, with familiar pacing and footage, but ultimately lacking the weight of the Infinity Ward reboot.
As a Call Of Duty multiplayer experience, Vanguard delivers. But what it gives is a stopping distance. The FPS experience has nothing to do with pushing the series forward or taking risks. Fans are sure to have fun, but its deathmatches and dominance are stuck in the past. Not to mention Zombies, which are too eager to turn the clock back.
Do something for me really fast will you? Pretend like you’re a judge on Great British Bake Off for a second. that is FPS week and Call Of Duty: Vanguard slipped a jam sponge down the table. You were about to take a bite, but it shoved it out of your hand and it splattered on the floor. You try again, but the slices meet. Tiling, flooring, flooring. You finally dodge the slap and get tit-for-tat. Turns out it… was merely fine.
At the base level, Vanguard’s multiplayer is a jam sponge. Classic Call Of Duty, inexpensive. Delicious, but we’ve seen it before.
At the base level, Vanguard’s multiplayer is a jam sponge. Classic Call Of Duty, inexpensive. Delicious, but we’ve seen it before. Participating in its various multiplayer modes is the hard part. You run and you shoot and you fall to the floor. Redo and the cycle continues. Sometimes, you survive and that’s pretty cool, but nothing spectacular.
This is despite Vanguard’s matchmaking options that let you decide how many players you want in your matches. They are divided into different “paces”: Tactical, Offensive and Quick. So, in theory, you choose Tactical if you want a slower, more measured experience. While Assault and Blitz have bigger teams, bigger maps, and greater chaos. But no matter what I chose, I ended up having a similar amount of time. A burst of adrenaline, where I dashed across the map and called out some Killstreaks, followed by long moments of death after respawning. Vanguard was originally Fast – probably the fastest Call Of Duty ever felt – with soldiers burning all over the map at vertical speed. No matter what ‘speed’ you combine, there’s no escaping the demise of agencies that are COD. The meat grinder that accompanies us all.
One thing I can’t type is the game’s gunplay. Vanguard’s weapons give you a satisfying aim and shoot, with meaty sounds and solid punches. Customization has also been further improved, with a whopping 10 accessories per gun now, as opposed to Modern Warfare’s five. And I have to say the arsenal is fun and unique as well, with funky STGs, explosive BARs, and M1 Garand with its iconic “chiiink” reload that caters to a wide variety of play styles.
Everything else is as you’d expect and is mostly unchanged from Modern Warfare. You have custom downloads, perks, and kills. Ninja skills reduce your steps; Intel killstreak equivalent of World War II UAV; The Double Time perk lets you sprint for longer, while the Glide Bomb is a World War II Predator Missile. They linger as local down-regulators of aging. I think it’s fun to see them hanging around, but I’m crying when I see some fresh faces.
That said, I like some of the old maps from Call Of Duty: World At War came back for another bash here. The Dome is always a frenzy set atop the Reichstag, while the Castle is a manifold scramble through a Japanese fortress. The new maps are strong too, with French Bocage farms and Numa Numa scorching earth, all of which provide fun playing fields to drop ammo on.
Switch to Zombies, though, and it’s an unusually stripped-down experience. Over the years, Zombies have become more and more complex. Just look at Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold Waroffering, which helps you to teleport between two different realms. There are bosses and intricate easter egg puzzles to solve. You can even enhance the gun’s ammo to electrify, burn, or explode the undead. Year after year, it morphed from the simple debut of World At War clearing the waves, into a dense web of zombie-slaying hijinks.
Vanguard retains many of the must-haves of the mode, along with its most powerful additions. You can Pack-A-Punch your weapons to make them more powerful, and use chug potions to give yourself things like reload speed. Zombies drop scraps that you can use to build yourself armor and tools to stop the undead, like clapping monkeys. The equivalent of the ultimate Cold War capabilities returns, like the free circle and the energy mine. And of course, the waves become progressively more difficult as you mark them. At its core, this is definitely Zombies.
But now there’s a bit of roguelite in the mix. Zombies pits you against the undead in a central world where your crafting benches, etc., are all conveniently located in a town square. It’s a pretty large area, with dilapidated buildings and open spaces to drop rotten, but you can choose to take the action elsewhere. Specifically, the central area is also home to three different portals, each corresponding to a type of quest. One requires you to stay within the radius of the floating skull as it inched forward, another tells you to collect the stones that you plug into the turrets and the last type of mission is you hold out for a space is tight when the timer ticks.
Complete these and you will be returned to the central space with more than just pocket money. Hearts are the new currency that can be used at the “Covenant” altar on alternate upgrade picks. Things like massive damage increased when shooting while stationary, or a lot of healing when you melee zombies. You can equip three at once and swap them out if you want.
And that’s for the most part, well, it. While efforts to give the mode a roguelite makeover, its mission structure gets old pretty quickly. Sure, overcoming the undead is fun, but there’s only one way to go: Success lies in killing hordes of zombies, pocketing coins, earning hearts, and attaching it to your perks and weapons . There aren’t any secret sections or paths to explore outside of this core loop. There is no boss. There are no unlockable areas outside of the hub space. There is no test to gamble your money. For a quick fun, what’s on offer is perfectly fine. But it was dropped so much, that its replay value was also truncated in the skip.
In the end, Call Of Duty: Vanguard is something of a screen saver Call Of Duty to me. Something to keep our trigger fingers busy until the next major release. Sure, that’s fun, but that’s the point. There’s no ambition here, no rocking, no shifting. The COD shuffling is non-stop, and this seems like another symptom of the schedule.
And finally, I can’t help but mention Call Of Duty: Warzone as another component of the Vanguard package. ONE World War II flavored map will replace Verdansk in December, and Vanguard’s arsenal will likely change as well. Any weapon promoted here will transfer to battle royale, so maybe this will boost my motivation to jump in. But even so, the fact that I was looking for a source of motivation to play Vanguard, really said it all.
