Those options merge nicely with Vanguard's four ultimate abilities – a devastating energy mine, an invisibility field, a party-wide damage buff, and a speed-dampening vortex – which fit into the usual DPS/Tank/Healer class balance setup, and add a few more thoughtful flourishes to the action. A lot of your time in Vanguard's Zombies will be spent between encounters, dawdling around a war-torn hub zone (a la Dark Souls’ Firelink Shrine or Destiny’s The Traveller) where you can juice firearms, craft weaponry, and swap in powerful but generally uninteresting buffs called Covenants that might give you a kickback of health with every melee kill or revive allies faster, and so on. A Treyarch developer told me roguelites like Hades were influential during development, and that touchstone jumps out immediately. What’s new this year is an element of randomness on each run.

I've always loved how Zombies lets Call of Duty stretch its legs into a brutal, Doom-y aesthetic, and Treyarch proudly heaps on the gore as waves of hungry enemies keep coming and you to survive as long as possible. You and three friends have been transported into a hellish, phantasmagoric alternative universe - red skies, cursed talismans, eldritch gods - about a million miles removed from the steely realism prioritized by the mainline Call of Duty games and Vanguard’s own campaign and multiplayer modes. Unfortunately, a stark lack of content upon release squanders that potential, instead making Vanguard’s Zombies mode come across as a total afterthought. And for anyone who spent their high school years boarding up windows when Zombies debuted in Treyarch’s 2008 Call of Duty: World of War, the developer’s latest interpretation had the potential to be both a homecoming and a living testament to how the mode has evolved since. With Vanguard returning to the gristly frontiers of World War II, we are culling the rotten corpses of the Third Reich on gothic European battlefields for the first time since 2017's Call of Duty: WW2. Ĭall of Duty’s Zombies mode has circled around the axis again. For our thoughts on the other two modes, check out our Call of Duty: Vanguard Single-Player Campaign review and our Call of Duty Vanguard Multiplayer review. Note: This review covers the Zombies mode of Call of Duty: Vanguard.

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