Call of Duty: Vanguard Review

Vanguard is craftsmanship in search of a purpose. Running the 2019 engine at full polish, it is one of the best-looking WWII games ever made, Stalingrad snow, Pacific jungle light, destructible wooden cover splintering convincingly under fire, and its gunplay carries the reliable snap of the modern era. The campaign assembles a proto-special-forces squad from four theaters, and the flashback structure gives Polina's Stalingrad sniper arc real menace, but the frame story is thin, the villain is a nonentity, and the game's uneasy blend of period reverence and action-figure history leaves it tonally nowhere, a WWII game with nothing on its mind about WWII.

Multiplayer's Combat Pacing slider was a sincerely good idea, letting players pick chaos density per playlist, yet weapon bloat with ten-attachment builds and a general sense of interchangeability set in fast. Zombies shipped visibly undercooked. Everything works; almost nothing resonates. That is a B built entirely out of professional obligation.