REVIEW : Call of Duty: Vanguard (PS5)
The multi-year Call of Duty saga, when not embroiled in past, modern, or future political fictional conflicts, often and willingly tries to romance the most significant events of the Second World War. And if the narrative vein of Modern Warfare and the spin-off Black Ops are still developed on certain characters who later became favourites such as Captain Price and Frank Woods, the return to World War II instead becomes a great opportunity to give space to new stories. And give voice to new heroes, strictly American and sometimes Russian.
Soviets that a few years later ended up becoming the communist threat that jeopardized the American way of life because, in the end, it’s always up to the Yankees to save the Western world, even when it comes to video games.
Call of Duty: Vanguard is ultimately a close relative of WW2, being set during the same historical era and sharing the same software house. Yet, looking more closely at Activision’s new blockbuster, it is clear how the latest effort by Sledgehammer Games has inherited the same predisposition to the abundance of the content of Black Ops Cold War and largely the gameplay of Modern Warfare, to which the developers have added some new features of their own. But will it be enough to play it safe not to disfigure Vanguard in the presence of two chapters much loved by the community and equally appreciated by critics?
The hour of heroes
The Call of Duty: Vanguard campaign is a collection of stories from the front featuring four prototypes of the patriotic soldier, armed with courage and infallible aim. Initially, the emphasis is placed on the birth of Task Force One, one of the first elite special forces units, engaged on German soil to deliver a decisive blow to the Nazi Reich.
The videogame camera follows the stories of each of them. It leads us to fight the Nazis in different places and times of the world conflict, making us relive some important events such as skirmishes in the Pacific or the clashes in North Africa, but also the incursions on the Western Front and the battle of Stalingrad between the Soviets and the Germans.
It is these continuous stop & go, between story and action, to make the pace of the campaign drop dramatically, where the previous Call of Duty: WW2 was a river full of bullets and adrenaline that carried the players in the middle of the western American offensive to free Europe from the Nazis. For completeness of information, I must admit that these are well-made and even interesting films to follow. There is no lack of moments in which the typical action of Call of Duty emerges from arrogance giving depth to the single-player mode. Still, they are not so numerous and stand below the standards the series had accustomed us in recent years.
The only new element, videogame speaking, concerns the special abilities of the four characters, a feature that does not clash too much but does not add that pinch of spice to the shooting phases: Polina’s agility allows her to move quickly when crouched, as a good leader Arthur can give orders by asking his comrades to attack the enemy troops, Wade is equipped with a special view capable of highlighting the silhouette of enemy soldiers for a few seconds, and in Lucas’s inventory there are more types of explosives and grenades. In short, nothing is too sophisticated, even from the point of view of the gameplay.
On guard, Vanguard
Archived a campaign that is certainly enjoyable but far from the epic nature of Modern Warfare and the surprising investigative drift of Black Ops Cold War, the multiplayer sector of Vanguard presents itself at the starting points already full-bodied, ready to welcome the numerous contents that will be added when seasonal post-launch support begins. The package includes the stainless modes that you would expect to find in a chapter of the saga, so they range from the classic of the classics like the Team Deathmatch to the heart-pounding rounds of Search & Destroy. The novelties are represented by Patrol and Collina Dei Campioni, two-game variants that reinvent the standard dynamics of Location and Clash.
The first is a hymn to dynamism in which the players of the two teams must compete for control of an area in constant motion, earning points by maintaining control for as long as possible. In an FPS that cannot be more dynamic and frenetic, the need to move continuously throughout the map makes Patrol an undoubtedly congenial mode to the DNA of Call of Duty.
Hill of Champions is the real surprise of this edition, an intelligent, wise evolution of the Clash mode and winks at Warzone in some respects. Structured as an Italian tournament with eight teams made up of two or three members, in this game variant, the teams fight each other on four types of rotating arenas to overwhelm the opponents. Each kill suffered by a player and the subsequent return to the game takes away one of the twelve or eighteen lives available to his team and will be excluded from the match when the life counter hits zero. From time to time, the remaining teams will be able to purchase new weapons, specialities, and other benefits during the break round, thus spending all the swag collected in previous challenges or stolen from the eliminated teams.
From unlocking perks, grenades, and guns, we move on to the levelling of the same weapons to obtain various accessories to be assembled to distort or improve their statistics, ending up playing with a certain character to be able to show off in combat a unique phrase for every occasion. Heroes and heroines of the campaign like Kingsley and Polina bring additional side contents on the plate, asking players one thing and one only: to spend hours and hours on multiplayer modes, no matter if facing human opponents or the undead of Zombies.
A full “do ut des” style mechanism that will intensify with the passing of seasonal updates, also aided by the intelligent unified progression system that also involves Warzone and the last three chapters of the rich Activision franchise.
A war without borders
But the real richness of this return to World War II lies in the number of playable maps in multiplayer, even twenty, many of which are taken from the missions of the single-player campaign. Among those that most favourably struck me is Tuscany, the intricate Tuscan village full of claustrophobic alleys and alleys, Berlin and its ruined buildings from which to ambush deadly and the wide shooting lines that characterize the arid scenario of Desert Siege.
Postcards from the front
For a certain period, the Call of Duty saga has been hostage to a technical component not in step with the times due to a proprietary graphics engine squeezed to the maximum and renewed every year without major and obvious improvements. With the IW 8.0 developed by Infinity Ward for the soft reboot of Modern Warfare, the series has finally returned to shine, especially under the graphic aspect, thanks to advanced technologies that Sledgehammer has reused to create an extremely enjoyable second world war videogame to be admired in all its spectacular brutality.
REVIEW : Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition (XBOX Series X)
