End of 2017, to be exact. The (early leaked) setting was not received equally positively on social media and Reddit. But for the skeptics, there’s good news: Call of Duty: Vanguard is a better game than Call of Duty: WW2, and that’s entirely thanks to the multiplayer mode. The bad news is easy to guess: the other two pillars are quite disappointing.

Single Player

Vanguard calls itself ‘The Best WWII Game ‘. A controversial slogan, especially in a year that Hell Let Loose was released, but above all it is ironic: the narrative single player mode does very little with a loaded setting like the Second World War.

In single player, you control several members of some sort of elite team that invades Germany to steal important classified information. It’s the end of the war – the Allies are already knocking on the German door – yet the five-man team is captured. The members are interrogated one by one. During that interrogation, you dive into the past of the character in question on the basis of a flashback. That’s the mission structure.

It works in itself, because you learn the get to know five characters and their motives a little better. Yet the dynamics between the characters are not really noteworthy. The best interaction is with the female Russian sniper, by far the funniest character on the team. She is clearly inspired by the Russian Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a female major who took no fewer than 309 lives in the Red Army with her sniper rifle.

Empty shell

Her missions are therefore the best missions in the game. They are all set in Stalingrad, but not as you probably know the Russian place. Stalingrad, known as the unruly Russian front in World War II, is summery, cheerful and full of spirits in the first mission. You meet family, talk to some friends. It’s really pleasant. Only later in the game does Stalingrad become recognizable: chilly weather, bombed-out buildings and a lot of German occupiers.

Vanguard does its best in those missions to show multiple sides of the war, but you can’t say that about the rest of the game. The rest of the missions are very

hit or miss

. The more story-driven missions in Stalingrad are hits, but the bushwalk missions, where you have to sneak through the jungle after a plane crash while bayonated Japanese charging at you from all sides, are arguably the worst Call of Duty missions in years. – so boring and flat.

Shortage

But what really stands out is the length: after four hours the story is over and you have gone through all the personal adventures . That’s too short to really feel connected to the members of the team. In fact, when the game is over, you still barely know who is who. The narrative development of the characters feels rushed and Vanguard lacks an interesting overarching narrative. That now goes no further than ‘bad German must die and we must steal documents, let’s work together to make it happen’.

The Vanguard single player lacks load, something that gives the setting weight. That you are in Germany towards the end of the war is quite well thought out. But unfortunately, almost every choice developer Sledgehammer Games has made is a safe one. That’s a shame given the setting. There are so many great stories about World War II to tell without having to compromise on spectacle as a Call of Duty developer. But Vanguard’s single player is above all a lot of spectacle.

But what really stands out is the length: after four hours the story is over and you have gone through all the personal adventures

Extreme hectic

It’s in that makes it easier to get excited about Call of Duty: Vanguard’s multiplayer. That’s just a spectacle, but it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than that. This descendant can best be described as a combination between Modern Warfare (2019) and Black Ops: Cold War. That means a lot of close-range sub-machine gun battles, a lower time-to-kill

, small maps without (three) clear routes and a very high pacing with a lot of freedom of movement. Jumping, sliding and diving over objects: it all happens at a figurative speed.

It is for the first time possible to adjust the size of the teams yourself. For example, if you want to play Search and Destroy with teams of ten players instead of six, you can indicate this in the search options in the main menu. The game calls this adjusting the combat pacing. You can choose from three categories: Tactical Combat (normal), Assault (slightly more players), and Blitz (the largest number of players). The number of players in those categories varies by game mode.

This is all terribly poorly explained and the name could have been many times simpler, but it works. You notice the chaos of a game of Team Deathmatch in particular on a small map like Das Haus with more than twelve players. Grenades are constantly flying back and forth, the kill feed is working overtime and the respawning is such a hectic affair that you can get serious kills by blindly holding down the right trigger after respawning.

That may sound like too much of a good thing, but don’t forget that you can set yourself whether you want more players in your server. We really appreciated the alternation between hectic and extreme hectic. As far as we’re concerned, combat pacing will remain in subsequent Call of Duty parts.

Furthermore, the multiplayer is probably what you expect. Entertaining and powerful rewards after a killstreak, assembling your weapon like in Modern Warfare, perks: it’s all there again, and for now the balance is fine. The stars of the show are the maps. Vanguard has twenty maps, sixteen of which are playable in the standard 6 versus 6 modes (and four in the new Champion Hill mode). Not only is that an impressive number: they are also almost all nice maps. That’s pretty rare in a Call of Duty game. The small Das Haus in particular feels like a classic.

Slam on undead

And then there’s the third pillar: Zombies. This time Zombies is being developed by the creator of the mode: Treyarch Games. Do you notice that? Meh. Even after years of reviewing and playing Call of Duty games, it’s a little hard to tell the difference. Not that there isn’t a difference in quality between the modes, because there definitely is and was, but Zombies has become very much a mode for people who play Zombies. Narrative and substantive, there is sometimes no more rope.

Luckily the gameplay is self explanatory. You visit different parts of the map from a kind of hub, in which you of course have to complete short objectives and get stronger while you put legions of zombies (and a few variants) to the fire.

The action is fast paced and upgrading the characters (and their supernatural powers ) is entertaining, but to be honest, we got bored of the mode very quickly. The missions you do in the different parts of the map are very similar, making the whole thing monotonous way too quickly. The core of the mode, and with it the motivation to get further and further, is not enough for a Zombies mode. The promised content update is necessary in that sense, and hard.

Call of Duty: Vanguard is, of course coupled with Warzone, on the one hand a very complete game. But that’s especially true on paper. In reality, the single player and Zombies mode fall short in several areas, especially in length and replayability. The 7 above this review therefore mainly relates to the fantastic multiplayer mode, which made us appreciate the old principle of brainless shooting again. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s vital information if multiplayer isn’t normally the mode you buy Call of Duty for.

Call of Duty: Vanguard is available on PlayStation 5 , PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and S, Xbox One and PC. The game was reviewed on a PlayStation 5.

Call of Duty: Vanguard builds on the three well-known pillars of the series: a cinematic single player, fast multiplayer and cooperative zombie shooting. What is somewhat surprising is the choice to have the game play during the Second World War. It hasn’t been that long since Call of Duty: WW2 came out, right?