- Publisher: Activision
- Release Date: Nov 5, 2021
- Also On: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
- Unscored
-
Nov 17, 2021With every new year, we get a new Call of Duty, and while this year's entry is decent, it's not essential. There’s still some good fun to be had here, but it never goes beyond expectations. In particular, Zombies in its current state feels like a lackluster step back. If you're an avid Call of Duty fan, Vanguard may still be strong enough to hold your interest, but if you've grown skeptical over the years, it isn't likely to bring you back into the fray.
-
Nov 15, 2021Despite its impressive characters, Call of Duty Vanguard has an extremely ordinary story. Multiplayer modes are fun, but they do not feel like a new game.
-
Nov 15, 2021As a huge multiplayer fan Call of Duty: Vanguard ticks all of the right boxes for me. It's chaotic and fast paced and besides some bugs that will surely be patched out, there's little to complain about. Unfortunately, the accompanying Zombies and Campaign modes are lacklustre and it is simply not worth buying the game for them alone.
-
Nov 15, 2021Multiplayer is the only reason to play Call of Duty: Vanguard, thanks to substantial online content and a satisfying competitive pace. Both the zombies mode and the campaign are tiresome, clichéd, and mediocre, best left out of the history books.
-
Nov 8, 2021Call of Duty Vanguard falls in the predictable traps of an annual release, but pulls through with a fun campaign and multiplayer at the cost of duller Zombies.
-
Nov 18, 2021Is Call of Duty: Vanguard a good game? It depends. If it is your first Call of Duty, it will be one of the best experiences in your life. However, if Vanguard is your nineteenth Call of Duty you will find a visually impressive, yet hollow, campaign, a multiplayer that soon becomes routine, and a disappointing zombie mode.
-
Game World Navigator MagazineDec 15, 2021It’s hard to name a single thing about this game that’s worth your time. [Issue#257, p.54]
-
Nov 19, 2021Weak story with forgettable characters is punctuated with cookie-cutter multiplayer modes. Vanguard is a sum of its mediocre parts.
-
Nov 28, 2021With Vanguard, Call of Duty returns to the roots of the series: World War II. The solo campaign is entertaining but short, and the multiplayer is exactly as expected: full of action and adrenalin. However, the few novelties are not spectacular enough to lift it above mediocrity.
-
Nov 17, 2021Call of Duty: Vanguard does have its moments, even if they are quite few and far between. The campaign goes back and forth between innovative and entertaining, to repetitive and bland, while the Multiplayer and Zombie modes don’t bring anything new to the table other than how impressive they look.
-
Nov 10, 2021Judged on its own terms, Call of Duty: Vanguard offers a solid, albeit predictable campaign, an engaging multiplayer with deep progression systems and satisfying gunplay, and a Zombies mode that will only serve as a minor distraction in its current state.
-
Nov 10, 2021Call of Duty: Vanguard is the video game equivalent of an old war film that you’ve seen many times before, but still enjoy watching with a feeling of nostalgic comfort that armed conflict perhaps should not provide. It won’t set the world alight, but gives you the opportunity to blow a lot of it up – which is, after all, what we want from this series.
-
Nov 9, 2021CoD's multiplayer is as dependable as ever, but Vanguard's campaign and Zombies mode fail to capitalise on what could be interesting ideas.
-
Nov 22, 2021Vanguard is more of the same when it comes to the campaign, with very few sparks of innovation. It’s inoffensive, yet bland. Zombies tries something new but goes all-in with a single map that just doesn’t work well at launch. Multiplayer moves the focus away from the brilliant gunplay, pushing chaos above all else and making fundamental errors that shouldn’t be present in the 18th iteration of Call of Duty multiplayer.
-
Nov 23, 2021In play, it is smartly dressed but simple, like a child of wealthy parents who can afford to be a bit dim.
| This publication does not provide a score for their reviews. | |
| This publication has not posted a final review score yet. | |
| These unscored reviews do not factor into the Metascore calculation. | |
-
Dec 13, 2021Despite a couple of the Russian levels breaking some new ground, for the most part Vanguard remains a series of narrow shooting galleries that you’ve seen and played countless times by now. Ultimately, like most Call of Duty games, you spend an awful lot of time crouched behind a waist-high wall, waiting to shoot a man in the head as he peers over his waist-high wall. That’s possibly a pointless criticism, but having just suffered through Call of Duty: Vanguard’s vacuous and derivative campaign, such a banal observation feels like the most fitting conclusion. [Campaign Score = 40]
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 167 out of 680
-
Mixed: 51 out of 680
-
Negative: 462 out of 680
-
Nov 6, 2021Way better than last year's cod and obviously better shooter than battlefail2042. Would recommend to old and new cod fans!
-
Nov 6, 2021And 2021's best shooter is finally here! Good job Sledgehammer Games! Better than last two cod's.
-
Nov 11, 2021