Saving Private Ryan cast a long shadow over videogames, and only now - more than 20 years after Spielberg's film debuted - are games finally finding their way out of its desaturated vision of the Normandy landings. Call of Duty: Vanguard - which you can buy here - is the sixth game in the long-running FPS series to be set in the Second World War, but it's the first that feels like it's doing its own thing. Vanguard takes a couple wild swings that don't pan out all that well, and plays it perhaps too safe in other areas. The overall effect, however, is that Sledgehammer has managed to make WWII, as a setting, feel fresh again - and thank goodness.
Let's pause momentarily to marvel at what a profoundly strange thing Call of Duty is in the year 2021. "I'm going to go play Call of Duty" has long since become a meaningless phrase, since 'Call of Duty' is a label that's been smeared out across a startling array of different experiences, which now all somehow plug into the massive, shared world of Call of Duty: Warzone. It's an alternate dimension with its own timeline and history, a metaverse made up of caffeine- and sugar-infused hyperviolence. Zombies roam the land and Cold War-era spies try to stop the nuclear apocalypse, while everyone else is busy murdering each other forever and ever.
It's Warzone's madcap goofiness, more than any Ken Burns-style documentary footage, that informs Vanguard's pulpy campaign. The "birth of the Special Forces" stuff that Activision has been hinting at in the leadup to Vanguard's release is mostly nonsense: this is a comic book origin story for a team of commandos who would've been at home alongside Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare.
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