Game review: Call of Duty Vanguard (2021)
Today, I've dragged my broken carcass over to the computer to talk about the most recent release in the Call of Duty line up, Vanguard. This iteration of COD comes from Sledgehammer Games, who was responsible for COD WWII and Advanced Warefare. I'm just gonna be super up front now, I think this is probably the worst Call of Duty game I've played thus far, it's absolutely abysmal. It feels like what a company trying to clone COD would come up with. Comparing my experience with it to Cold War leaves me feeling nothing but disappointment and a flappy penis, which is a pretty big bummer after I was looking forward to having a new competitive shooter to jam on for the next few months.
But, lets talk about why this game absolutely eats more ass than a college frat dudebro.
I'm gonna start off with talking about the part of COD games that almost no one actually gives a shit about, the Campaign mode. I'm fully aware that no one buys call of duty games for the campaign mode. However, if they're going to waste their time developing it and putting it into the game, I expect it to be at least reminiscent of having effort put into it. Cold War, the previous iteration in the COD franchise, did actually have a pretty decent campaign mode that had a fun narrative going. So, I hoped this game might do the same or at least be mediocre enough to be passable. Instead, the narrative just sucks some filthy ass. Which is pretty funny, since the trailers for this game seem to stress how the story is going to be a big, epic extravaganza.
You can complete the story mode in roughly 3-4 hours depending on the difficulty you choose to play on, and if you decide to fuck around at any point while playing. I finished it in around 3 or so hours myself playing on normal mode. The narrative of the game is basically like watching filler episodes of a Shonen Jump anime. It's all just flashback after flashback of playing through past things members of your group have done. There's literally only two missions in the entire game that happen in the present time of the game, and they're both the shortest missions in the game. And, maybe that could have still been fun if any of the characters were interesting or likeable, or if the flashbacks were well thought out missions, but they're not. Not that they would have time to flesh out any character depth or do any arcs of growth in 3 hours. But, man. The characters are so boring and uninteresting that I have a hard time even remembering them after playing.
Every mission is basically just there to show how much of a badass every person in this group is, and show you why you should have your pants down, bent over for these superhuman, godlike soldiers. But, everything showcased is underwhelming and boring, with most parts of the game just being wave defense missions where you sit stationary in one area and just shoot things for several minutes before moving on. It's very generic and lackluster, and I just don't even know why they bothered to put this shit into the game. There's also a very woke character in this game, being a female sniper for the Russian forces who also happens to be a lesbian. Yeah, because the Russian people have historically always treated homosexuals super well. I'm totally sure that they would have been super nice, and super fair to a lesbian woman during WW2. Anyways, again, I'm sure no one really cares about the campaign mode anyways. But, for the few who do just take my advice and pretend it doesn't exist in this game.
Now, I guess the next part of this game that I'll talk about is the thing I've seen most people bitching about, the zombies mode. Between twitter and reddit, I've seen people shitting, pissing and cumming in their own faces over how god awful it truly is. I saw a lot of people saying it was borderline unplayable and disgraced their gamer ancestors. And, honestly, I think this is probably the only time I've seen the community react this way to the zombies mode. Normally, people suck the ever loving fuck out of this modes dick and go on and on about how much they love it. So, I was pretty surprised overall to hear this. So, I dove in and gave it the old college try for about 90 or so minutes I'd say.
And, my takeaway is that saying it's unplayable is an overreaction. Is it generic, dull and boring like the rest of the game? Yeah, yeah it is. This is like if you took the zombies mode from all the other call of duty games, and stripped it down to its barebones and then took a sanding wheel and grinded that those bones down into powder and slid it up your rectum. It is missing all of the complexity normally found in the zombies mode. It almost honestly feels like playing an early access game on Steam. There's no depth to this mode, no super cool lore, no real personality really happening with the game. Again, though, the game works and plays. It's definitely playable. But, it just feels like COD Zombies for a 3 year old with how diluted it is from the normal formula for this mode. It is the most straight forward, simple zombies mode I've seen. To the point where it feels like the developers just wanted to make it purposefully boring by taking out all the fun parts of the zombies mode.
It's not offensively bad or anything, just super generic and boring. When I hear unplayable thrown around, I'd assume that it's crashing the game anytime you open this mode, or bricking peoples consoles and computers. So, I definitely think that's just good old twitter/reddit being over reactive and whining because they love to circle jerk with their tears over stupid shit all the time. If you were considering buying this game for the zombies mode only, I'd just say pass because literally any other COD game has a more interesting/fun experience to it over this one. It doesn't scratch that itch that past iterations have, and I didn't even have much fun when playing with a friend which normally is what makes zombies super fun. I personally would rather just go back and play Cold Wars zombie mode at this point.
I guess I should finally get into what people actually care about now and talk about the multiplayer. I have almost nothing good to say when talking about the multiplayer. I played it for about 2 hours and then finally uninstalled this game after that. I think it's quite possibly the worst multiplayer experience I've ever had with call of duty. Everything about it to me besides one component is god fucking awful. The time to kill on the game is ludicrous, you die so fucking fast that you can't even react until after you're dead. Even on games where I was going positive 8 or 9 and doing decent, I thought I was getting my cheeks spread non stop just because you die so much through out a match. Headshot damage is so overly done, that you can basically kill someone from Narnia with an SMG if you want to. Every game has at least one or two people with 20-60 multi kills, which is ridiculous to see.
Half the time when you die, you don't even know how or why you just died. My friend and I were literally bewildered during our first two or three matches because we would just drop dead out of nowhere without any indication that we were being shot or taking damage sometimes. I think part of it is that you can shoot through pretty much any wall in the game, and for some reason incendiary ammo is a thing so after your shot by someone you can continue to take damage for several seconds or just straight up die from someone you killed seconds prior. It is some of the lamest shit I've ever seen. I also noticed grenades seem to not give you any indication at all when they land near you, so prepare to get blown the fuck up or set on fire all the time without any chance to skirt out of the way. The spawns in this game are pretty fucking god awful, as it seems has become tradition in the call of duty games. There were several times where I would just spawn into a group of enemies in multiple locations across the maps. It just feels like total RNG where you spawn, and most of the time it will be in front of an enemy.
The maps in the game are some of the most generic, boring looking maps I've ever seen. Everything is so bland and gloomy looking that I couldn't even come up with callouts to make while playing with my friend, because, everything literally looks exactly the same and has multiple parallel locations across the map. I also feel like the design on a lot of these maps is just terrible, because it feels like you're playing the game within the world of the movie Aliens, with enemy players seemingly coming out of the walls to fuck you in the ass. There are so many doors and open spaces all over these maps, it's impossible to know where to expect people to come through. There's also hardly ANY footstep noise that is audible in the game, because this game is non stop noise. I felt like I was getting sensory overload from the constant mixture of AI screaming, explosions, gun fire, dogs barking, ambient noise and my friend talking. It's impossible to hear people walking near you with all of the god damn noise happening. It's awful.
There was one thing that I did enjoy about the gameplay in multiplayer though. Which was the movement system. I enjoy fast paced movement that feels smooth, and this game does do that really well. You feel like you're gliding around the map while sprinting and moving, and it feels really nice overall. The fast paced movement of games like Apex Legends has always been a big turn on for me, so I'm glad more games are getting it right and making the running around actually enjoyable instead of just making me feel miserable while trying to get from point A to point B to defend an objective. But, that's literally the only thing I think this COD multiplayer does well. Everything else is just bad or generic. The gun play is the same old COD, which is fine, but not any different from past games. Kill streaks are the same, with throwbacks from past games being included as well. It's just a bad multiplayer experience and one I think pretty much everyone could skip over.
So, overall I think this game is a fucking dumpster fire. I thankfully got it for free thanks to sharing games with my friend, but I felt horrible that he even spent the money to pick this up since he felt the same way as I did pretty much. He couldn't even finish the campaign mode because his system overheated several times while booting it up. I'm not sure why, as he was playing on a brand new Series X, but it was to the point where he just gave up and has been trying to get a refund. The zombies is generic and stripped down to almost nothing, the campaign mode is absolute filth straight out of a crusty asshole and the multiplayer is probably the worst I've ever played in a call of duty game. I would not recommend this game to even the worst of people. If you want to play some COD, you'd be better off going back to Cold War, which had it's own problems for sure. But, Christ on a bike, it was way better than this shit.
Until later, I guess, cuhhh. Take it easy!
It has been a long time since I played Call of Duty. I think it is time to play again.