Call of Duty: Vanguard

Sledgehammer Games

images c/o MobyGames (PlayStation 5 version)

Recently I went back to play the original Call of Duty and its expansion, United Offensive. With the current state of the franchise, and its slow evolution over the course of 22 years from ambitious war semi-simulator to the hulking propaganda machine that it is now, I thought it was a good idea to get back to the franchise’s roots in the World War II shooter genre. Well, now I’ve played the other end of the franchise’s visits to the Big Show: Sledgehammer’s Call of Duty: Vanguard. And the differences couldn’t be more stark.

Let’s get this out of the way: the world that gave us Call of Duty 1 and 2 and all the ones in between is long gone. The series hasn’t been interested in meticulous re-enactment since Call of Duty 3; everything since then has been narrative focused, less a simulation and more an action movie. We now live in a world preoccupied by the rise of authoritarianism in America and Europe, haunted by the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic, and still reeling from the fallout of January 6. It is into this world that Vanguard was born. No wonder it was a flop. Vanguard eschews everything that defined the series’ WWII outings before it: that early focus on authenticity is gone, but so too is the serious tone of Call of Duty: WWII, Sledgehammer’s previous game. What we get is a weird mix of action movie derring-do with an almost Wolfenstein-ish tone, but without the Wolfenstein-ish mad science that makes that franchise so appealing. It makes the whole war feel like a jape, and I don’t know how I feel about that.

Making matters worse is that the story is all over the place, by design. The main plot is a story about a special forces unit, Vanguard, assembled from prodigious operators from across the Allied forces. It’s quite the eclectic mix: the hotshot American ace pilot, the foul-mouthed, rough-riding Aussie, the requisite Soviet sniper lady, and the British paratrooper leading the pack, which causes some consternation among the Nazis given that he’s black. We also get the token upper class Brit who doesn’t get his own playable chapter before being unceremoniously killed off, and the Serbo-Croatian guy with zero characterization who gets a lethal chair to the face at the end of the prologue. You don’t even get to find out what he looks like, since that chairing happens in first person.

The rest of the game revolves around the remaining team being captured and interrogated by an officious little Nazi prick one by one, with the bulk of the game being their stories being told in playable flashback. The end result of all this is that the game is a bit of a highlight reel of the franchise’s World War II games. Stalingrad has appeared in every World War II-themed Call of Duty game that has playable Russians in it, except for United Offensive and that one Nintendo DS version of World at War. Thus we get not one but two Stalingrad chapters, one at the start of the siege (so you get to watch the Russian girl’s father die and her home city destroyed) and one in the dead of winter, complete with some sniping fun. The North African Campaign was a big part of Call of Duty 2; guess where the Aussie’s story takes place? The hotshot American pilot gives us a twofer: a re-enactment of the Pacific theater chapters from World At War, flamethrowers and all, as well as a rehash of the annoyingly bad fighter plane sequence from WWII. And lastly, our British paratrooper lets us relive the chaos and terror of the opening hour of Call of Duty 1 with a night landing in Normandy.

Of course, all of this is presented incredibly slickly; where WWII felt a little more like an interactive take on one of those Playtone war drama miniseries like Band of Brothers, Vanguard feels more like Modern Warfare 2019 with a World War II skin on it. Everything feels weirdly modern; the bad guys dress in SWAT gear and there’s crazy anachronistic or just plain wrong weaponry everywhere — including STG44s well before they appeared in the war, and in several places showing up where they absolutely shouldn’t. And that’s not even getting into the absurd range of modern-style attachments and modifications, like using tape for a better grip (which wasn’t conceived of until decades after the war, though Sniper Elite is guilty of this too.) And yet despite the slick presentation that we’ve come to expect from Call of Duty, Vanguard is also jank as hell. You almost wouldn’t notice it, but there’s all kinds of animation errors and just plain bad modeling.

There’s an almost smirking tone to the game that just kind of bothers me. It’s as if the game knows its own plot — something to do with an attempt take the Reich underground as Berlin falls, so playing to those long-time conspiracy theories about how the Nazis fled to places like Argentina — is horseshit. The ragtag band of misfits feels like some Avengers shit, and they’re not written too differently either — maybe a few less jokes. For all its anachronisms, for all its winking references to Call of Duty: Zombies and the nerve gas from Black Ops, it still tries to pretend it’s serious; and it’s just not. I would rather there have been some kind of mad science plot; that at least would have fit the tone. God forbid more games be like Wolfenstein, anyway.

I don’t know how I feel about Vanguard. It’s messy, it’s weird, it almost feels like they had a lot of ideas for a whole franchise of World War II games but didn’t feel they had the ability to sell it to a notoriously fickle (and increasingly pro-fascist) audience, and so they just crammed all their ideas into a six-hour game. Making matters worse is that as the game’s multiplayer aged, they just gave up on any sort of historical accuracy whatsoever. And yet at the same time, the game still has that frustrating quality the franchise has had since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare: it’s a deeply cynical game about horrible things happening that’s also a complete blast to play.

 

  -June <3

Part of a series on Call of Duty 

Call of Duty	United Offensive	Call of Duty 2
Call of Duty 3
Finest Hour	2: Big Red One	Roads to Victory
4: Modern Warfare	Modern Warfare 2	Modern Warfare 3
Modern Warfare DS	Modern Warfare Mobilized	Modern Warfare 3: Defiance
Modern Warfare 2019	Modern Warfare II	Modern Warfare III
Warzone
World At War	WaW: Final Fronts	World At War DS
Black Ops	Black Ops DS	Black Ops: Declassified
Black Ops II	Black Ops III	Black Ops IIII
Black Ops: Cold War	Black Ops 6	Black Ops 7
Ghosts	Advanced Warfare	Infinite Warfare
WWII	Vanguard	???
Zombies