Call of Duty: Vanguard
Oh, and love the series Call of Duty feverishly scrolling from side to side. Understandable: each development studio sets its own direction and vision for individual sub-franchises, but lately it's been downright crappy. To make a long story short, it looks like the straight guys at Treyarch are the only ones left, but the rest of the gang has rushed in to embrace the new trends. Allowed fresh eyes to penetrate your body, so to speak. And this is the second time in a row, first Infinity Ward was a bastion of chastity, and now Sledgehammer Games is breathing down their neck.
We thought it would be about the story? Not so fast: first of all we will talk about the gameplay. Vanguard has one major problem — This is not Call of Duty! Yes, the writers have embarked on the same intimate, claustrophobic warfare that they did in Modern Warfare: weapons closer to the screen, corridors ever tighter… a sense of brotherhood and other values — There's plenty of that in here. In some places they even try to force the atmosphere, include horror-scares and stealth-mode, and the whole Normandy landing tries to imitate «Overlord», from color grading, to scripting scenes and… And even the protagonist.
But the series is loved for the dynamics: the high rate of shooting and killing a huge number of opponents. Counter Strike on steroids, the militaristic shooter equivalent of Serious Sam. Spectacular, loud, spectacular — these epithets still fit the new shooter, but the dynamics it began to resemble some Killzone. In addition, the authors have clearly played in Doom Eternal and decided that it would be nice to create a players deficit of ammunition, and a normal amount of ammunition allowed to pick up only from a select few corpses and some containers with ammunition. Yeah, remember the flying missions from Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault? So there you go — there's a bit of that here, despite the fact that it ends quickly and is not so crooked on the controls.
It's obvious that the multiplayer and zombie mode was made by completely different people. Only, honestly, it's not even lazy to describe them, there's just nothing to say about them — there awaits you a traditionally good, incredibly fast, angry and dynamic battle with traditionally low TTC. Here, the authors did not betray themselves, so everything turned out as in the most good parts of the series.
And here's a story dedicated to those who like the plan to get brown…
On paper, everything looks good: a secret international squad «the best of the best of the best, sir! (With the distinction!)» is assembled for a covert operation to intercept all the worst Nazi secrets being smuggled out of the blazing Germany of 1945. Trying to take out even more secret Nazis preparing to create a new, fourth Reich after the fall of the Wehrmacht. That is, our heroes — A kind of Western Elusive Avengers… only monstrously boring: each character's backstory is presented as flashbacks between interrogations and torture, where the gang leader, aristocrat Arthur Kingsley, pirouettes in the manner of Sasha Grey «even when I'm getting fucked by the five of us — Actually, I'm the one who's banging the five!»
On a separate point, it is worth pointing out that the main measure of trust and respect for their allies is their… spit out and grinded up by the system: the Australian bomber got his ass wiped by a pompous British commander-in-chief, and the downed American pilot stomped in the same mud as the 95th «dark-skinned» and thereby learn what it's like to be black. Well, the nurse Polina Petrova single-handedly encouraged the Russian partisans to liberate Stalingrad from the Germans in spite of «Red Army sobaki», seemingly also doing something in the background during the war. And to somehow justify the presence of such a Dream-Team, in the final mission we will be given to play for each of the characters and use their special abilities.
Yes, everyone here is — a unique personality, so someone knows how to order shooting at enemies, to throw explosives aptly, to focus in slo-mo with auto-aiming, and someone deftly crawls through narrow spaces and never parted with his sniper rifle. Try to guess who's who.
With all that said, the game looks at least solid and to the point. All the fears aroused by stories about problematic development with a lot of teams involved were in vain. In spite of their «duty», The script is solid and no pages of narrative are ripped out of it — he's just boring. And the whole game is like that: expensive, polished, but completely soulless, boring, and lacking in self-sufficiency — They just recruited thousands of employees and gave everyone a say in the matter. That's why the main thing Vanguard teaches us: «Negroes also fought», and the revolver shotgun was in every corner of the World War II military theater.