![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Featuring hints of the recent Outbreak mode, players are tasked with taking down a demonic entity while wielding otherworldly powers of their own, including rings of fire and icy doom, which lets you summon a blizzard. This iteration is a bit like a roguelike zombie dungeon crawl, and that’s pretty awesome. The studio’s undead intuition rarely misses the mark, and Call of Duty: Vanguard is poised to take zombies down a fantastic road. Last but certainly not least is Zombies, which Treyarch designed. Even if you don’t want to turn dials, Assault is a great standby for the standard-issue Call of Duty multiplayer. When I wanted something where I might not see a player immediately and had time to aim a rifle before getting shot, Tactical pacing was perfect. When I felt like lobbing a bunch of grenades while packing a shotgun loaded with incendiary ammo, I dialed into Blitz mode, which caters to instant action with an almost immediate time-to-engagement. This probably seems like a small thing, but it’s great because you can select exactly the kind of multiplayer matches you want, on top of the core game modes like Kill Confirmed, Hardpoint, or Domination. With Combat Pacing, you can influence the player count and time-to-engagement of all the activities you favor. The most impactful device to the core systems is the addition of a Combat Pacing dial. The key to the online offering is some highly impactful decision tools on top of its already best-in-class shooting and customization. Multiplayer succeeds, but not due to the addition of any gun, super-slide, or jetpack mechanic. I will marvel at how this campaign made a revenge-fueled badass sniper scenario feel like being stuck in traffic for years to come. Call of Duty campaigns tend to run from strange to spectacular to emotionally resonant – this one is none of those and easy to skip. This dissonance is pronounced, bizarre, and runs through the lifeblood of the entire experience. The narrative never decides if it wants to stay grounded in the harsh realities of World War II or go hard on the ham, with absurd caricatures of sniveling villains who would be more at home in a bad comic book. The multitude of scenarios and segments look gorgeous, but the good looks can’t save this journey. I found it puzzling that one of the characters in the game basically has superhero powers, allowing them to see enemies through sight obstructing scenery and auto-aim on-demand with a combination of god-sight and bullet-time. Unbelievably annoying trial-and-error stealth segments are shockingly juxtaposed against bombastic action sequences. You must run under desks, fighting a never-ending slog of light flashes, as you climb up rocks and walls. Unfortunately, it drops the ball and delivers one arena after the next full of trash to kill without ever realizing that sniper fantasy. Vanguard has all the trappings of a ready-made Enemy At The Gates sniper vs. It’s a shame, because some of these scenarios and characters feel like they should have been slam dunks. There's no cool subterfuge mission to break up the humdrum, only tasks that will leave you begging to just clean out another kill room. While big arenas full of opponents to fight are nothing new for Call of Duty, it's even more tiresome engaging in the non-arena segments. These characters are placed into boring segments that are as dull as possible and formulaic, without real opportunity to shine. They are chunks of lifeless cardboard that fail to reach even the one-note action movie tier. Since the narrative jumps around from scene to scene, none of the characters carry any weight. While this showcases some excellent environmental diversity and its throbbing soundtrack begs to get the blood pumping, everything around these elements remains in the doldrums. We’ll get the rough bit out of the way first The campaign is ambitious and beautiful in scope, taking players to multiple key locations, including Stalingrad, the Pacific, and even North Africa. ![]()
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