Call of Duty: Vanguard Reviews
Vanguard’s campaign recalls the same shooting galleries seen year after year, full of cliches and with somehow even less point to it all.
Thanks to a surfeit of undaring options, solo and multiplayer, Sledgehammer Games' latest sports the most ironic subtitle of the year.
There’s no denying that multiplayer is by far the biggest selling point for Call of Duty and the mode that makes Activision the most money through both sales and microtransactions - heck, Black Ops 4 launched without any single player offering whatsoever - but this showing is poor from Vanguard. It’s fun enough at surface level, but it fails to provide a captivating narrative or any stand-out moments that could attempt to elevate it as one of the greats. It’s also shockingly short with zero replay value, which means the Vanguard campaign only helps to stagnate the Call of Duty franchise. With that in mind, if we are to get Call of Duty Vanguard 2 a few years down the line, this has laid a solid foundation to build upon.
Call of Duty: Vanguard is a first-person shooter set during World War II. The gameplay is exactly what you're used to from this series. Unfortunately, the multiplayer doesn't offer enough to keep everyone interested long enough. Zombies has the same problem: fun, but has less to offer than the previous versions.
Review in Dutch | Read full review
Call of Duty: Vanguard shows that this once great franchise is now a shell of its former self. But at least it doesn't crash consoles.
For the second year in a row, you can sense that the game was developed in a hurry, the menus copied from Modern Warfare and technical issues, the assignment of the Treyarch studio to develop zombies and its incomplete release, and the lack of different designs that distinguish each team from the other, are all indications that the game did not take enough time for development. Of course, the foundation of the series is always fun, the technical issues will be fixed with time, and it will be a good game until the next release. But the standard has become thinner than a mere "enjoyable foundation" and expected.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
While it adds some interesting new features to the Call of Duty formula, Vanguard's mixed bag of changes makes it a forgettable entry.
Vanguard's Zombies mode is goofy, gory, and adventurous, but it suffers from a deadly lack of content.
I think that the inclusion of cross-play will be welcomed by all gamers. This certainly guarantees that the wait time for getting into any matches will be all but gone.
Sledgehammer Games is no stranger to righting wrongs, as seen with its previous Call of Duty entries, but even with additional balance tweaks and new content, I’m certain five years from now that Vanguard will be looked down upon as one of the weakest games in the series.
Call Of Duty: Vanguard is less enticing than its recent forebears and that's a real problem when it's facing its own competition with free-to-play battle royale CoD: Warzone riding high (not to mention rival Battlefield 2042 out later this month). But with a solid multiplayer mode on offer, there's enough here to keep fans occupied over Christmas at least.
'Vanguard' might feel more complete after a few months of updates, but the current state is an unfortunate reminder that needlessly tight deadlines don’t benefit the people who make games or the people who play them.
Vanguard is exactly what anyone thinking about picking it up will expect it to be: a competent shooter that doesn’t do much new.
Call of Duty: Vanguard's singleplayer campaign is simply too short to get a recommendation. The multiplayer fares better, however it doesn't really offer anything new. Unless you have to play every Call of Duty game ever released, feel free to skip this one.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
Call of Duty: Vanguard is not a bad game, but it feels halfhearted, with most of its heart poured into the campaign. It’s something that doesn’t live up to its potential, and could’ve been better. If you’re picking this one up, do it for the campaign and stay for the multiplayer to prepare for Warzone. The Zombies mode should be avoided until more content gets added to it in the coming months. We won’t know how Vanguard’s integration into Warzone will influence the battle royale until next month. As it stands, Call of Duty: Vanguard is good enough to get you through until next month where hopefully there’s a more to return for.
At launch, Call of Duty Vanguard feels like a solid step-up from Black Ops Cold War, but falls short of the benchmark that was Modern Warfare 2019.
Despite the relatively engaging campaign section and attempts to provide a different experience and narrative from World War II, unfortunately it does not achieve this goal due to its weakness in designing some steps and maintaining their attractiveness.
Review in Persian | 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.
Some could argue that wall running didn’t belong in previous entries, but they added verticality to gameplay, and made players look up instead of left and right. Vanguard lacks all originality, doesn’t improve in almost any areas, and goes down in quality.