Review: Call of Duty: Vanguard’s Looks to the Past to Find a Way Forward

Only by leaving WWII in the rear-view mirror does the game live up to the innovation promised by its subtitle.

Call of Duty: Vanguard
Photo: Activision

After countless Call of Duty games, it takes real guts for the developers at Sledgehammer Games to label their third solo project in the series Vanguard, promising, in effect, the development of something new. And on that level, this tale of World War II’s “original special forces,” the fictional Task Force One, falls short.

The game’s familiar corridor-based first-person shooting, however well disguised by beautiful environmental design, is no match for the chaotic, wide-open of the Battlefield titles, and the straightforward plot wants for the thrilling weirdness of last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. But as an overall package, and this includes the now-standard PvE Zombies and PvP multiplayer modes, Vanguard does show off a few new quality-of-life improvements.

Vanguard opens with a daring train hijacking outside of Hamburg, Germany, in April 1945, shortly before Adolf Hitler’s suicide. But rather than stick with that fertile and largely unexplored territory of the Third Reich’s final hours, most of the game’s levels proceed as playable flashbacks that tell the story of where Task Force One’s six-person team of international soldiers came from as opposed to where they’re going.

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That’s an understandable impulse, because where these characters have been pre-1945 provides an opportunity to recreate a variety of WWII battles in a way that technological limitations prevented in earlier iterations of the series. But visually impressive as it may be to partake in the aerial Battle of Midway, this and other skirmishes aren’t especially groundbreaking. In fact, they mostly scan as a strung-together show of war tourism, with players traveling from the dark, muddy farmland occupation of Merville, France, to the dry, dusty trenches of Tobruk, Libya, and snowy urban ruins in Stalingrad, Russia.

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The cinematic interludes between missions reinforce the importance of teamwork, which makes it all the more odd that it isn’t until the final mission, a prison break, that you’re able to work together. Until that point, you’re essentially playing glorified tutorials that use the vivid backdrop of war-torn environments to demonstrate each team member’s unique skill. If these missions served also to better characterize your lieutenants, they might be justified, but the game glosses past, say, the bigotry experienced by the Aussie Lucas Riggs, black Brit Arthur Kinglsey, and Soviet sniper Polina Petrova, focusing instead on the demolitions expertise, tactical commanding, and agile movements, respectively, that each brings to the table.

At best, Vanguard’s compartmentalization of its characters works to superficially differentiate them, but that comes at the cost to the game’s overall freedom and momentum, especially since its levels, as well as the soldiers’ abilities, aren’t equally satisfying. For one, American pilot Wade Jackson’s ability to highlight enemies is a necessity while wending through the foliage-obscured traps of Papua New Guinea’s Numa Numa Trail, and you’ll miss it when you’re trying to hold down a rocky outcrop in El-Alamein, Egypt.

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Vanguard, then, feels more like a tasting menu than a balanced meal. You get to sneak through ducts, scramble up walls in a decrepit department store, commandeer a dive bomber, and wield a flamethrower in order to clear out some anti-aircraft bunkers. It’s high-quality stuff, but it’s unlikely that it’ll all be to any one player’s satisfaction, and there’s no option to skip through chapters of the campaign or to get more time as Lady Nightingale. But in fairness, that’s what the very customizable multiplayer modes and offerings are for.

That’s why the game’s ambitious and entertaining final mission is so promising. Instead of having the cast separated by continents and time zones, you’re instead fighting side by side, the action automatically swapping you into the character who has the most appropriate ability for the task at hand. Instead of clinging to the well-trodden historical accuracy of this genre, the game offers a speculative glimpse of an untold shadow war against a Hydra-like Fourth Reich that continues its experiments underground. Only by finally leaving WWII in the rear-view mirror is Vanguard able to live up to the innovation promised by its subtitle.

The game was covered with a review code provided by Step 3.

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Score: 
 Developer: Sledgehammer Games  Publisher: Activision  Platform: PlayStation 5  Release Date: November 5, 2021  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Drugs  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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