Call of Duty: Vanguard

[Maf]

Wow. So I heard this game was not good but I’m thoroughly impressed so far. Maybe it’s because my expectations were lowered, but this campaign has some really cool stuff.

 

Easily more than any CoD before this is a character driven story. A special team of 6 have been captured by Nazi’s and being tortured one by one, and in between the torture/interrogation cutscenes they do flash back levels about each character and what they did to get a spot on this special unit. 
 

CoD usually jumps violently and wildly from level to level, big action to big action, and it all feels really distant and emotionless. Like a series of set pieces with some background noise narrative stringing it together. But with this context and the set up it really works much better. It’s not The Last of Us or whatever, but compared to previous games, leaps and bounds in the narrative department.

 

Speaking of TLoU perhaps the coolest character is Polina played by Laura Bailey. I just finished her level and it’s really great. She plays a Russian girl who lost her family to the war and is only fuelled by revenge. Her level is excellent with a good mix of big set piece, stealth sections, sniper sections. 
 

What makes it different as well as these levels feel much bigger and longer than past CoD’s. So far each level has different sections and each section has it’s own style of action or objective. 
 

The other thing with them going so hard on story is the cutscenes are really long. There’s one cutscene where they first get captured and introduce the Nazi interrogator* which goes on for nearly 10 minutes

 

*(played by one of the Lord of the Rings’ Hobbits of all people, the likeness is really good) 

 

The gameplay is the gameplay. Shooting is the shooting. So not much different there. Although I will say it’s nice to play a WW2 shooter again. The last one I played was, well, CoD WW2 from about 5 years ago but that game was lame so it’s refreshing to play a good WW2 shooter.
 

The only downside is graphically there’s lots of glitches and weirdness. Also no HDR support on Xbox. Google says it exists but not according to my TV.
 

I’m really surprised how hard they went on story and how much it’s working for me. Again not some boundary breaking innovation in game stories, but really surprising for CoD. I like this a lot so far.