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Gaming

09th Nov 2021

Call Of Duty: Vanguard is as close as we’ll get to an Inglourious Basterds video game

Rory Cashin

The new COD is one of the best looking games we’ve ever seen.

This review will be focusing on the single player campaign of the latest Call Of Duty game.

If you’ve come looking for a deep dive on the multiplayer, then this is not the place for you. As a gamer, I am a dedicated loner. A bit of me time, away from the world, no headphones on while screaming at a team mate for not throwing back a grenade fast enough. If you love the COD multiplayer already, then chances are you’ll have already invested in this game and no positive or negative review is going to change your mind. (For the record, I’ve heard it is very good.)

However, these kinds of games usually let the single player campaign fall by the wayside, putting only a fraction of the love, care, attention and time into it that is reserved for the multiplayer.

Call Of Duty: Vanguard is different in most (but not all) ways when it comes to the single player campaign. I played through it on the Xbox Series X and it is probably the first game that got the console’s fan whirring at top speed to keep up with the graphical prowess on screen.

To put it bluntly, the single player campaign in Call Of Duty: Vanguard is brilliant, and feels like the closest we’ll ever come to playing an actual Inglourious Basterds video game. But on the downside, it is still shockingly short.

Kicking off with an epic train heist, we are introduced to each member of our newly formed special operations task force in the midst of the action. From that explosive opening salvo, we then jump back in time, controlling each of the task force members in different places around the world, at different points in World War II.

So we play as an Australian lieutenant in the Battle of Libya in 1941, a US Navy pilot during the Midway attacks in 1942, a Russian medic and sniper during the Stalingrad invasion in 1943, a paratrooper dropped behind enemy lines in Normandy in 1944, and so on.

It cleverly switches up your play style, while also giving a narratively sound reason to make sure we never get bored of the arena we’re shooting Nazis in. Each of the characters play slightly differently too, with our favourite being Russian sniper Polina Petrova (played by the legendary Laura Bailey), who brings an almost 2016 Doom level of speed and franticness to her shoot-out scenes.

It all works together so well, the diverging storylines colliding to take out some Nazi leaders, filled with brilliant set-pieces and memorable characters, truly giving an Inglourious Basterds vibe to proceedings… and then suddenly it is over. We know better than to expect the single player campaigns of these kinds of games to go on too long, but at five hours, it does feel like this game is over when other games are just getting going.

You can always replay it at a higher difficulty, or dive into the multiplayer, but if it managed to be three to five hours longer, the single player campaign of Vanguard could have been looking at the possibility of being our Game Of The Year. Instead, it is just very, very, very good.

Call of Duty: Vanguard is available right now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.

Clips via Call Of Duty