Call of Duty: Vanguard Reviews
Call of Duty Vanguard's highly polished campaign provides a healthy amount of fun, even if its brief length and lack of variety lead it to fall short of the classic pieces of war cinema it's trying to emulate.
Vanguard's Zombies mode is goofy, gory, and adventurous, but it suffers from a deadly lack of content.
Call of Duty: Vanguard's multiplayer doesn't do enough new to distinguish itself from the last few years to be a great game, but its excellent maps and Champion Hill mode mean that it's still a reliably good time.
CoD's multiplayer is as dependable as ever, but Vanguard's campaign and Zombies mode fail to capitalise on what could be interesting ideas.
Call of Duty: Vanguard will get better with time, but the launch game is still an impressive package. The Campaign is short but sweet and the Multiplayer is a blast, though Zombies fans will likely come away disappointed. Even with Zombies failing to live up to expectations, though, Call of Duty: Vanguard still has a lot to offer fans of the franchise and is very much worth the price of admission.
Vanguard won't join the pantheon of Call of Duty games, but it's a decent stop-gap for those waiting for Modern Warfare's return.
A solid installment for the series with a satisfying story and great multiplayer balance.
Vanguard is an overall solid pick with a lackluster campaign, a nascent but incredibly promising zombies experience, and multiplayer with a few critical new aspects.
It will feel familiar to anyone who has picked up a controller and jumped into any of the past two dozen iterations of the franchise. More importantly, though, Vanguard is a Call of Duty game because of the role it proudly plays as a mythmaking vehicle.
Tweaks in multiplayer and Zombies advance the Call of Duty franchise overall, and an emphasis on distinct characters makes Vanguard's story fun, but it doesn't always mix well with the series' gameplay.
Judged on its own terms, Call of Duty: Vanguard offers a solid, albeit predictable campaign, an engaging multiplayer with deep progression systems and satisfying gunplay, and a Zombies mode that will only serve as a minor distraction in its current state.
Sledgehammer Games clearly had high ambitions when approaching their third solo Call of Duty project.
Call of Duty: Vanguard doesn't drive the franchise forward in any major ways, but its tense, cinematic campaign and satisfying multiplayer modes are worth experiencing.
Vanguard's multiplayer does just enough to be fun, but is largely unambitious. Zombies is a similar story and lacks any weight. This is a package that feels designed to be filler.
An unremarkable FPS story set in World War 2. Has moments of spectacle and is largely quite fun, but feels like you're a gun on-rails, hardly a war hero.
Call of Duty: Vanguard is a balanced game across the vectors of historical interest, good gameplay, variety, and a strong narrative. It ties everything together in a competent way that makes sense. That doesn’t mean it’s a spectacular game on the order of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which was a breakthrough game for the franchise because of its thoughtfulness and disturbing material.
Call of Duty: Vanguard's campaign is meaty, the Battle Pass will keep you going a while, and Zombies is wonderfully addictive.
Its narrative is fractious and slight, compared to Sledgehammer’s previous work, but the chance for a chaotic, target-rich experience with friends exerts a stronger pull than usual.
For all its incredible characters and acting, Vanguard has somewhat confirmed that Call of Duty campaign modes are going in two very different directions: the stagecraft is getting better with each release, but the wider experience is going downhill.