Call of Duty: Vanguard Reviews
Call of Duty: Vanguard is a great Call of Duty entry with absolutely stellar ser pieces, fantastic visuals, and plenty of modes surrounding an excellently fun campaign. The only downsides are the muddied stories… not to mention what is happening in the company that published it. Highly recommended for CoD fans and people looking for a bit of mindless fun set in WW2.
Overall, the new content on offer is a welcome addition but, honestly, I think many fans long for a return to the days before battle passes, microtransactions and arduous grinding defined the franchise.
All in all, Call of Duty Vanguard is an amazing singleplayer experience, with a more than decent multiplayer component. It plays and feels better than its competitors, especially Battlefield. The only other hard-hitting title out there right now is Halo: Infinite, but that’s offered for free for anyone and it’s really hard to compete with that. I would recommend you get it just for the story and maybe wait for a few weeks before jumping into multiplayer if you want to get the Battle Pass too.
Despite coming in with low expectations, Call of Duty Vanguard has failed to change our minds. Vanguard has managed to do the inverse of Black Ops Cold War; it has provided players with a fun multiplayer experience bringing back some fan-favorite maps while stripping Zombies of its roots. The campaign is an adequate story but it is ultimately forgettable; the campaign can be beaten in under 6 hours. Call of Duty Vanguard could have been so much better but ultimately feels like a rushed project. If you are going to play all the modes, then sure it’s worth the $60. If you were planning to purchase it for Zombies, hold off. Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War would make a better Holiday present than Vanguard. A fair price for Call of Duty Vanguard right now is anywhere between $25 to $45.
Call of Duty is always one of the biggest releases of the year, with Battlefield usually releasing just before it – but not this time. Call of Duty: Vanguard is the first in the series for a while to release beforehand, is it an improvement to the series? I’m here to tell you.
Thanks to a surfeit of undaring options, solo and multiplayer, Sledgehammer Games' latest sports the most ironic subtitle of the year.
It’s a longstanding truism that annual games are not well-suited to innovation. They tend to make only small, incremental changes but even these can thrill or displease the loyal year-on-year purchasers. Vanguard is exactly that kind of game in exactly that kind of series. What it does have is the extremely high production standards and level of polish that Call of Duty is known for these days. This looks and plays every bit like a game which cost many, many millions of dollars to develop. If you have ever enjoyed a Call of Duty game you will enjoy this one, too, and can expect to be kept busy until the next edition. 18 games in, that is about all we can expect.
Call of Duty Vanguard falls fully within the canons of expectation and offer of the series under almost every single point of view, resulting literally as a "another Call of Duty", which will entertain all those who have always found enjoyable and fun experience offered by the various chapters of the saga, but does not try for a moment to strive to offer something more.
Review in Italian | Read full review
All of this is precisely why Call of Duty: Vanguard is a missed opportunity for Sledgehammer Games, Treyarch, and Activision. The game suffers from an uncomfortable contradiction: the campaign and its visual cues favour newbies, while its multiplayer and its cranked-up pace is a veteran extravaganza. The single-player campaign is also unsatisfyingly short, while Zombies barely qualifies as a full game mode.
Once reinforcements do come for Zombies, it will be hard to argue against Vanguard as one of the best and most complete Call of Duty titles in the last decade, potentially of the franchise's entire history. This is one of the rare times Call of Duty has seriously dug into its past, learned from it, and delivered a new and improved experience. Vanguard sets a high bar for Call of Duty as the franchise moves into the next generation.
Perhaps the softest launch in Activision Blizzard's historic FPS series, Call of Duty Vanguard shows that there's much potential for this year's entry to grow. However with the weakest Zombies mode in series history, a shortage of cosmetics and upgrades for anything save your primary loadout, and a Campaign that could've offered so much more, Vanguard is a tough sell if you're looking for anything than your next TDM fix at the moment.
The story gets a little confusing at times, but overall Call of Duty: Vanguard is a solid game.
A bet on popcorn, action and fun. An ode to explosions, gunshots and getting up screaming from the couch. A formula that, despite not being liked by the current critics, continues to work perfectly
Review in Spanish | Read full review
If all you’re looking for from Call of Duty is an incremental change to the multiplayer along with a slate of new maps, “Vanguard” will do right by you. I can’t deny that the multiplayer is engaging, just as it was in the game before, and the game before that one, and so on. It is evident, also, that a lot of effort went into making the game look and feel good. But as a whole package, the game is a tremendous disappointment. Untold amounts of money, technology and talent were drained into “Vanguard,” a boring, joyless and pointless game. And for what? A profit, maybe. Beyond that, nothing.
Call of Duty: Vanguard does everything except Zombies very well. The problem is, we’ve seen it all before. Over and over and over again. While WWII can still be enjoyable in CoD, it very much feels like Activision relies on the same bag of tricks.
Call of Duty: Vanguard is not the full package fans have and should expect from a franchise that consistently tops the sales charts. There are not enough positives to overcome the fact that the amount and quality of its content is sorely lacking. This is a blast from the past in the worst possible way.
It follows the formula of a Call of Duty game, but delivers each element just a bit worse than it's predecessors. Call of Duty: Vanguard is a game that will surely grow and improve over time, but what we have at launch is something that at least fails to cater to what I was hoping for in any aspect of the game. The single player campaign is ridiculous even if it does deliver some moments of high action; the multiplayer is a mess, at least for someone with my skillset; and zombies is simply unfinished. It'll get better, but what we've got right now just isn't all that good.
Call of Duty: Vanguard unabashedly apes the style of 2019's Modern Warfare, with a multiplayer that is fun though familiar, but featuring a campaign that largely misses the mark.
Vanguard comes at an awkward time for Activision, and into a sea of competition. While the campaign is decent, it’s nothing to write home about, and the Zombies experience probably should have been delayed altogether. For Call of Duty, multiplayer is where it counts though and they’ve managed to put together a solid offering this year. Kudos to the teams at Sledgehammer Games and the other COD studios for managing to do so on such a tight deadline, in the midst of a global pandemic.
Now it's time for the final review and I'm extremely torn. I'll admit, I'm quite a fan of single player campaigns and I really liked this year's one. I thought the overall almost cinematic staging was great and it had some great moments. Being a sniper in Stalingrad reminded me of the great scenes in Call of Duty: World at War. But the other locations were great as well. Multiplayer is something I enjoy playing in phases. I liked Black Ops: Cold War quite a bit and found myself in battles there more often. The beta phase of Call of Duty: Vanguard put me off a bit, as I didn't really warm up to the multiplayer mode. Of course, what was shown was only an excerpt of the later scope. So this part could also win me over now in the weeks gradually more. In the end, the problem of Call of Duty is probably more and more the "egg-laying-willing-milk-sow" principle paired with the tight release procedure, which seems to be a challenge despite changing studios. With Call of Duty: Vanguard, Sledgehammer has shown some great ideas of how a good shooter can be presented.
Review in German | Read full review