Recently, I sat down with a couple games that weren’t soulless mobile gacha cash grabs, and I even finished two of them.  One was Stray, which was a game I’m not entirely sure I enjoyed but did make me think, and the other was Call of Duty: Vanguard, hereafter CODV, which I am certain I enjoyed but did not involve any great deal of thinking.

I’m not sure what this says about me.

I did start off with something of a bad impression of CODV because the first two missions are night missions, with the first one quite literally railroading (you are on a train) you through something of a tutorial and the second starting off with a forced stealth bit.  You really could not try harder to make your game less interesting from the get go.

And yes, the post-tutorial mission is One More Perspective On D-Day which I guess is mandatory for any shooter based in WW2 but at the same time urgh.

Moreover, while the first level sets up the premise that you are part of a team of extremely skilled people with all sorts of exciting specialties, it really doesn’t tell me why this team of people are together.  It made me really wish for a Mission: Impossible-style scene where you have a couple of guys at a table and they have dossiers on people and are tossing them down on a desk with “and here’s your explosives expert, and here’s your disguise expert, and here’s your driver” and so on.

You know the sort of scene I am talking about, I am certain.

Fortunately, AFTER suffering through the first couple of levels, I realized that I was getting my dossier scene, just sort of after-the fact.  Every character from the team gets their own spotlight mission or two, where you get to learn their particular gameplay quirk, and then the last mission is a team event where you are swapping between characters as you go.

It works.  It took a little while to get to the point where it started working, but it works.

The best Calls of Duty, in my opinion, are the ones where you are constantly being given new things to do and where the game diverges from a level design where you are just trying to cross invisible lines on the map to stop infinite waves of enemies spawning.  This is one of those.

There IS a little bit of the “just need to make it to the next checkpoint” in the ground levels, but it’s well-disguised.

On the other hand, there are two levels that fall prey to the problem of being set outdoors, in forest/jungle settings, and needing to keep the player in set corridors despite there not being, you know, walls.  It’s always a little obnoxious when you’re prevented from walking between trees just because you’re not supposed to go outside of the corridor.

In a bit of a meta moment, I got a kick out of realizing that, for the character whose gameplay quirk is that she can climb walls and duck through narrow spaces, every place she can climb is indicated with a bright yellow tarp at the summit, so if you’re ever not quite sure where to go you can look for the splash of yellow.

And in my final critique, I didn’t find myself wanting to stop and take odd little photos of set dressing to make fun of calendars with extra days or electrical sockets.  It didn’t have the same sort of obsessive attention to detail that I’ve enjoyed in other CoD campaigns.

With all of that said, though, it was seven solid levels – out of nine – involving vigorous debate between your on-screen avatar and various members of the Axis Powers, on the topic of which of you would be allowed to continue breathing, in a sort of words-are-violence-but-violence-is-also-violence way, and generally the debate goes to your favor so that’s good then.

I’m not sure of my comma placement in that last massive run-on sentence, and I’m not going to put much thought into making sure they’re all placed correctly.  I apologize to anyone with a strong sense of grammatical rules.

Finally, it wraps up with a sequel hook that made me desperately want to spend more time with these characters and I am reasonably certain that absolutely nothing will come of it and that was very annoying.  I think that’s the sign of a good game.