Call Of Duty: Vanguard
Developer Sledgehammer Games, Treyarch
Publisher Activision
Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series
Release Out now
Success breeds stagnation. This, in many ways, is the story of Call Of Duty. On two occasions, a game named Modern Warfare has left such a startling sales footprint that the developers tasked with following it haven’t dared shift a toe in any new direction. The last time it happened was in 2019, when Infinity Ward’s reboot picked up more players than any prior game in the series – thanks in no small part to Warzone, of course, the battle royale to which it lent an engine, a dour art style, and some wonderfully fluid movement.
Two years on, we can see how Activision’s studio family has responded. With a subtitle presumably selected for maximum irony, this is a game that, in multiplayer at least, leans back into the scrappy, smallscale encounters that exemplified and jettisons all else. The frustration is that Sledgehammer (this year’s developer,) was onto something genuinely new. For its previous entry, , the studio invented War mode, an asymmetrical experiment that embraced power imbalance. Storming Omaha beach under cover of AI cannon fodder felt impossible – until a single player slipped through the line and cleared a bunker of gunners.
