Call of Duty: Vanguard
Call of Duty Vanguard is like a quick bite at a fast food chain: it’s nice and easy and pretty okay, but you know exactly what you’re getting and also that you can find something better elsewhere that is certainly also more surprising. Vanguard relies on the basis that has been there for years and hardly changes anything about it. That doesn’t show too much ambition or fantasy, but it still produces a decent game. The campaign is immersive, offers variety and takes players to compelling World War II battles. The multiplayer is (too) well-known, but thanks to the choice for ‘pacing’ it can be tweaked to your own taste. It is a pity that some maps are not well balanced and that spawn points are placed here and there unhappily, but otherwise the traditional multiplayer plays away quite nicely. Champion Hill is a nice addition to the multiplayer and allows gamers to experience a slightly more competitive way of playing in an accessible way. Zombies is a bit out of place: where the campaign and multiplayer do what they always did, the Zombies mode is just not as good as before. Fortunately, there is still more content for Zombies, but at the moment that mode doesn’t have much to offer. The main question is whether all this will interest gamers enough, or whether the majority will just continue to focus on Warzone. The latter would certainly not surprise us.
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‘About the same, but different’ has been a pretty nice way to describe a new Call of Duty game for years, just like it applies to several other annual games. The studios that are working on the game add their own elements and change the setting, but if you look at the total recipe, it appears that the details in particular are changed. Call of Duty Vanguard is no exception. The game contains the same elements as any previous Call of Duty game and does some good and less good things within those elements. An extra drawback that Vanguard has is that the game comes out in an era in which Call of Duty gamers have concentrated on Warzone en masse. The free battle royale game quickly gained popularity last year and in that area even had little to fear from Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War. A similar ‘supporting role’ is lurking for Vanguard.
Of course: Vanguard is going to influence the world of Warzone in its own way, just like Cold War did. Rarely has there been so little hype surrounding the release of a Call of Duty game as there is now around Vanguard. That’s remarkable, because like Call of Duty World War II, Vanguard has World War II as its central theme and that has traditionally been a popular theme among shooter fans, especially if those fans are old enough to play the first Call of Duty games and the older Medal. of Honor games. Some of them may dive into Call of Duty Vanguard and end up through the campaign in Normandy, Stalingrad and Midway, among others, or encounter the same environments in traditional multiplayer, but an equally large – or larger – part of the gamers will be especially looking forward to December 8th. On that day, the first ‘Vanguard Season’ in Warzone will begin and a Vanguard map will also be released for Warzone. So let it be immediately clear that this review is not about that, because we have not been able to play this content yet.
What’s left then? The ancient trinity of campaign mode, competitive multiplayer mode and Zombies. All three of them are part of it and all three are as predictable as the sirens that start blaring every first Monday of the month at noon in the Netherlands. Is that bad? No, not really, as long as you know what you’re buying. Moreover, known material often means that it has been tinkered with for years and that the whole is now at a good level. Now the latter doesn’t apply to every aspect of this game, but Call of Duty Vanguard can certainly provide you with a good time, whether you go for the multiplayer or especially looking forward to the campaign mode or Zombies.
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