Call of Duty games can sometimes contradict each other. The franchise dictates that each new game has a specific feel: things like quick kill times and consistent approaches to movement and weapons, and campaigns that mix a great sense of scale with an individual battle intensity. Call of Duty: Vanguard keeps all of these things, but it also leaks under the formula. There are times when the underlying elements of Call of Duty seem to hold you back, like in its single-player campaign. Other times, as with some of its multiplayer offerings, it takes helpful steps to unify ideas that move the series forward, albeit incrementally. Overall though, the Call of Duty formula makes Vanguard feel lopsided. It climbs some great heights, but stumbles often on the way.
Vanguard returns to WWII, but takes a fictional and exaggerated approach to the conflict. It puts you in the shoes of four veteran heroes who come together to form the first modern special forces team. The story can be a bit cartoonish at times - it feels like the Call of Duty version of something like The Expendables as it assembles a team of impossible-to-kill action heroes, but it's also appropriate for a game where you kill. Hundreds of enemies unaided on each mission. These people are the best of the best, and the story takes you through flashbacks of each, establishing why they are the best and then letting them work together to hijack a Nazi train and destroy a Nazi base.
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His special forces team heads to Berlin near the end of the war, hoping to obtain information on a secret program before the Nazis bury him before the Red Army approaches. The team you play on is matched by super-evil Nazis on the opposite side (Dominic Monaghan from The Lord of the Rings as a worm nazi nerd is particularly fun to hate), and most of the game is framed as a series of interrogations. after the bad. the boys capture the heroes. It's remarkable how much time Vanguard spends on cut scenes and character development, actually. Creating memorable characters and leaning on storytelling is an area the franchise has often struggled with, and much of what makes the campaign fun is how hard Vanguard keeps building its team - it's all character, all the time. . That helps keep the story from falling apart as it jumps through both the war timeline and the world, leaving you in major battles so you can see how each character got to where you find them.
But it's in those moments of character development that the Vanguard half of the game fights against the traditional half of Call of Duty. The campaign is all about introducing each of your team's characters with their own missions, sending you to various theaters of WWII in an attempt to offer a variety of experiences in a variety of locations. It's hit or miss though - Vanguard wants each of the characters to feel like a stuntman by giving them different abilities, but not all of the accompanying ideas work especially well.
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