Call of Duty: Vanguard Review | World War Woke

welcome to call of duty vanguard diversity broken servers diversity camping diversity hobbits diversity empty servers diversity diversity diversity [Music] welcome to world war woke [Music] all too frequently aaa publishers like to compete with each other to see which one can utterly destroy its best and most beloved franchise and 2021 is proving to be an excellent year for such shenanigans joining the ranks of ea bethesda and ubisoft activision has shouted hold my beer and strive to annihilate its own credibility and the call of duty franchise this is without doubt activision's battlefield vagina moment they have decided to dial the in-game politics up to 11 whilst kicking the quality control completely off of the stage please note i have completed the campaign which probably qualifies as masochism i have prestiged once in online multiplayer and spent a small amount of time testing out zombies which was basically just asset flipped multiplayer maps and the most low effort zombie mode to date i am dreadfully horrible at first-person shooters and a proud inveterate hardcore camper think what you like but i never afk i don't cheat unlike one-third of all call of duty players according to recent polls and frankly my dear i paid for this game so i had every right to camp in the corridors and pump rpgs through doorways especially since i like lying down in video games and running around just seems like too much effort if you ask me spoiler warning this video game has a very very shitty plot indeed shitty characters and an even shittier political message there is no way i can fully explore the full scope of this game's shitness without spoiling certain aspects of the plot but take heart the entire game isn't worth playing anyway so frankly the harm i can do is severely constrained by the inherent deficiencies in this product a brief history of the call of duty franchise the story of call of duty is an all too familiar tale of how franchises degenerate and go into decline precisely because of the way the mainstream video game industry has declined and become degenerate it all started so brilliantly back in 2003 with the og call of duty and for over a decade the franchise was a mainstay of world-class top-shelf first-person shooters and pretty much set the standard for the industry the formula was simple make a brilliant game and make lots of money both gamers and publishers were all collectively happier than pigs in [ __ ] naturally over the last 10 years or so the emphasis changed right across the industry instead of being about competing in the marketplace by making a better product it's progressively become about making the game as cheaply as is humanly possible monetizing the living [ __ ] out of every single nook and cranny of the game bombarding the audience with advertising campaigns pivoting towards insidious wakery and blanket bombing the players with monetization i am not going to go into fine detail here because with 19 mainstream games multiple spin-offs for handhelds and mobile that's our [ __ ] phd thesis right there and that's before anyone gets into a debate about which title marks the defining moment when the franchise went into decline but i personally think that it is not controversial to say that call of duty world war ii was a fairly clear example of post peak call of duty by this time the franchise was very literally apple bobbing in the toilet bowl of greed desperately pushing its shameless face into the fecal slurry in an attempt to bite that last dollar bill tucked up behind the u-bend players stood around on the normandy beaches at the site where tens of thousands of soldiers lost their lives chilling out online in social spaces where their purchased loot boxes would parachute out of the sky to be opened in front of other players to create loot envy because nothing goes together better than kiddie gambling and mass slaughter in fact maybe on an ethical dimension perhaps they do go together well but i digress it also had black nazis because of diversity and marketing reasons because they wanted players to identify with their avatars because that's how the [ __ ] up minds of marketeers work they are totally down with the whole idea of making lols with nazis to help people with black skin identify with their character's skin whilst conveniently shrugging off the fact they're also now identifying with their nazi uniform and on top of all this sick and abhorrent marketing amorality the game itself was a bit [ __ ] i don't think anyone would dispute that call of duty was brilliant call of duty world war ii was shitty and call of duty vanguard may well mark the end of any credibility this franchise still has i will leave it to you to discuss where the precise trajectory lies and which games marks the precise tipping point in their decline but one thing is of note vanguard has taken the notable step of completely taking the knee embrace the current paradigm of make up the facts as you go along social media politics abandoned historical accuracy integrity and its own fan base then decided to bash itself on the head with the stupid hammer by additionally ensuring it produced the absolutely most functionally shy video game possible to boot with the most astonishing levels of wokery i [ __ ] you not but first let's discuss just how much of a technically bad state this game is currently in functionality and [ __ ] vanguard is the worst functioning call of duty release i have ever played so let's quickfire some of the [ __ ] experienced the game comes with a 38-page end user license agreement and a 36-page privacy contract if you're a first-year law student deciphering that [ __ ] to a 100 degree of understanding is probably over a term's work right there the always online live service interface is [ __ ] it's like it has a life of its own you log in and try and play you can queue but the loadouts are locked for a minute or two whilst the game warms up i guess after each match the ui likes to show you stuff sometimes overriding your own menu selection sometimes switching you to things you didn't click on sometimes you click on one thing and the ui is so sluggish it takes you somewhere else basically after each match you pretty much just have to let the ui biff out for 30 seconds until it becomes semi-usable again they also haven't fixed the vibe suck chat notifications i've tried everything at this point and have all notifications switched off across the board yet relentlessly in the middle of the campaign invariably at some cutscene dramatic moment i will see the words but destroyer 666 has come online flash up in the chat box this has been a problem for [ __ ] years something is booked between the blizzard client and the game itself on pc because this seems hard coded i guess someone might have thought about fixing this but i guess they were too busy posting on twitter about why carl rittenhouse doesn't deserve a fair trial or reading up on critical race theory before the next creative meeting talking about vibe killing what the [ __ ] is up with the cursor in vanguard this is something that should have been obvious in testing had they done any testing but the game keeps insisting on resetting your big fat cursor to the center of the screen and slapping it up there at every inconvenient opportunity tense cut scene of an interrogation slapper big fat curser on the woman's nose mvp post-match cut visuals go on slap another cursor in the middle of the action on the incredibly rare occasion that anything remotely dramatic or exciting happened by way of cinematics you could rely on the magical moment being ruined by having your new little hangar on friend the fat curser pop up and wave at your mind's eye and shout look at me look at me i'm still here i'm an annoying [ __ ] curser i probably spent more time moving that [ __ ] cursor out of the way than enjoying the actual game in fact the game of moving the cursor off the screen i will begrudgingly acknowledge was more fun than some of vanguard's deliberate content the spawns in multiplayer were a painstakingly crafted and finely tuned [ __ ] show i'm talking random spawn switching no consideration to what's going on where the enemy players are they just picked random spots on the map and randomly spawn you there a lot of the time i have spawned in front of groups of enemies in their spawn point i have been spawned into gunfire petrol bombs and explosions i have spawned behind the enemy spawn point although to be honest most of my best kills have involved me spawning behind the enemy team and shooting the poor oblivious pilgrims in the back but that's another story it's not uncommon to have runs of instant spawn deaths that last five six or seven consecutive deaths in a row literally spawn into instant death it is also without doubt the most unstable call of duty i've ever played for all its multitude of sins call of duty is reliably professional in the way it runs but not this time it got slightly better in the last few days but most of the time i have played has been cursed by routine crashes and i've had to scan and repair three times there are huge issues with game mechanics the shield appears to be bugged so in small maps like das house you just encounter armies of [ __ ] with shields on their backs now when i've tried to use a shield properly i've been one-shotted from the front by someone with a pump shotgun but sling that [ __ ] on your back and keep running around and it's like someone has tripled your hit points and hid in your hitbox can't really blame people for doing it similarly shotguns are insane and right now are an i win button on top of this there are loads of head glitching spots again on das house there is a spot where people just throw up a mobile barrier climb on it and shoot through a tiny gap head glitching i could just about kill them half the time and i'm an expert camper on top of all of this the net code general state and latency of the servers is tragic so anyone running around with a one shot one kill op weapon will always win a trade at close quarters i'm usually railing with a two-shot kill weapon and frankly i'm getting [ __ ] tired of shooting someone four to six times dying and then watching the killcam explain to me that i only hit them once and it doesn't help that it keeps matchmaking me into lobbies that routinely have a 90 plus millisecond ping that's nearly in [ __ ] russia the multiplayer game runs like a [ __ ] cat and there is no hiding it whilst i know there's ways to game the system it's just not my style i might be a camping [ __ ] but i have my standards as stunted and as limited in scope as they are i'm not going to use exploits or cheeses on other players sure i will camp like a [ __ ] in a doorway but that's my right but i'm not putting up barriers and climbing on them just to make myself unhittable besides sounds like too much effort to be honest i had huge issues with the color palette in the campaign and less so multiplayer i'm not quite sure what's going on with their choices of color but in lots of areas i struggled to pick out targets from the background everything was this kind of brownish greenish smear the dash house playlist was broken after the first match it would always take me to a different map until i turned off cross play which fixed it no explanation no tool tips no warning just didn't [ __ ] work like so much of this game when i unlock a new weapon attachment and select it it still flags with a green diamond notify me that i haven't noticed it yet so i have to both select it and then wiggle my [ __ ] mouse up and down over it just to prove to the game i've noticed it it's constantly updating [ __ ] shader packs i'm talking obsessively and then still gives me shader pack warnings throughout the [ __ ] campaign forget getting immersed in the [ __ ] story if the cursor isn't popping up in the middle of the screen for a chat i have a red shader warning blinking at me out of the corner of my eye sometimes it just locks my loadout options and sticks a little padlock on it probably something to do with not syncing with their digital store the game is a clunky jumbled mess and don't get me started about the patches updates playlist updates it's like the game seems to see me playing as some kind of inconvenience as it focuses on the really important job of staying up to date reloading shaders updating the shop and crashing on time seriously one session i started playing it wouldn't launch it made me fill out a bug request form then i relaunched it then it required an update when that was done it finally started it told me it needed to update my shader pack or some [ __ ] i sit there like a good little doggie for another 10 minutes and then when it's finally done it tells me that this requires a restart i restart it and now it starts compiling my shaders all over again just to make sure there was enough piss in the beer it then shortly afterwards crashed restarting the whole process and telling me i had to do it all over again from the beginning now this isn't a game i've just installed i've been playing it all week it shouldn't take me 30 minutes filling in a form and a large mouth full of [ __ ] around to just turn it on that is a lot of effort and hard work just to launch an application and let's be honest here it's not really worth the effort vanguard was not in a fit state for release naturally they're gating progress as hard as they can ridiculous challenges on the weapons kids so you have to install three specific mods then get 100 specific types of kills with those three mods attached these are later stage achievements so they don't overlap with much else then you have to do it with three other mods and 100 types of specific kills xp is slow everything is just stretched out like watered down soup to drag out time played and this is before season 1 micro transactions launch and they unchain all the totally psychotic monetization specialists and unleash them on the player base as a footnote cheating is now the new normal seriously there appears to be zero effort in moderating or addressing the hacking issue i will let you be the judge but i've seen no scoping bolt action sniper rifle users dominate close quarters maps with d finesse and precision of neo from the [ __ ] matrix people ain't even hiding it these days they don't seem to need to you see people vectoring in towards you in killcam constantly pre-targeting you through walls and with their itchy finger constantly tapping on that snap to shoot button no nobody cares about the cheating anymore well the publishers don't care recent polls show about a third of the call of duty community are cheating these days so accept the fact i might be [ __ ] at video games but i'm a death lord when it comes to camping some pricks just knew where i was no perks no prior notice just a quick tell with their pre-targeting and they jumped in guns blazing on my position i might be old slow incapable curmudgeonly and very very drunk but i know how to camp and i know when someone magically knows where i am the golden rule is if you're camping and you've killed someone the next guy might know you're there [ __ ] they might come back to teach you a lesson but if you're in an obscure spot for the first time you have every right to be suspicious when you get wall banged from across the map by a dude with a sub machine gun running at top score between the cheating the server latency the bad net code and the broken guns and equipment the multiplayer is a miserable experience before you even get to the utterly woke operators when you put eight rounds into some dude with a two-shot kill weapon then watch the kill cam of him running towards you jumping not getting hit at all and killing you it's frankly time to go and play something else talking of woke this game is so blisteringly woke it could curdle milk they have now introduced a text filter on your own loadouts literally just using the word [ __ ] will get it blocked they even blocked felching which is pretty obscure fisting fingering pedo circumcision and george floyd also got banned and nobody is going to see these these are your loadout labels in your ui you can't even say rude things in private anymore whoever compiles these lists has a pretty pathetic and sad existence i guess you could say that people who run tests on those words do too but i sleep soundly enough at night fortunately however the following terms were acceptable white privilege get woke go broke and antifa strangely so was cosby sweet seriously this is some hardcore deliberate crt woke [ __ ] black pride is allowed white pride was not it is safe to say that whoever came up with this list had an agenda an agenda that seems to think politics in video games is okay if the person supports antifa black lives matter or critical race theory run some tests on the words yourself because it's painfully obvious that they brought in some high ranking officers from the ministry of right think to make sure as they say we all get the message well i always like a challenge so i did try to see what i could get past the filters my personal favorites were finger bashing rectal prolapse and i found the following one particularly charming blowbang apocalypse obviously blowbang holocaust was banned in the interests of good taste credit where credit is due mind they have a function that just let me import all my settings and key bindings from the previous call of duty game i [ __ ] you not i was actually grumbling about the fact i was going to have to reconfigure vanguard and i quote just like every [ __ ] year why can't i just carry over my settings so well done activision you did something right activision did one thing right in this whole damn game so what about the pvp well i've said most of what needs to be said really it's a [ __ ] mess thrown out into the marketplace with the attitude of well we've got a year to fix it it's now become a yearly ritual for all the call of duty content creators to make videos in the first few weeks of launch along the lines of top 10 fixes for multiplayer and the like it's a polite way of them to say dear [ __ ] lord it's broken this year too also i have to ask what is up with the voting thing for mvp this is some new system or an old one reinstated personally i don't care it's [ __ ] i always lose the vote i'm sorry but there is no place for democracy in a competition the person wins if they do enough or they lose if they don't you don't have a little vote afterwards to soothe people's fifis imagine if it was an exam little billy came topping the test but we had a little vote amongst the class and decided to give top place to someone else because feelings [ __ ] off the wokeness and ludicrousness of the game really goes to town in the multiplayer it's pretty ridiculous in the campaign but it goes full [ __ ] in the multiplayer at launch the only playable operators are woke representative stunning and brave you can play from a whole selection of crack female frontline troops from all around the world you can even be a white german turncoat or even a japanese asian turncoat you can be all types of bitter female protagonist but sadly as the first of a long list of reverse racist critical race theory motivated snubs against the british there are no british operatives which is a bit strange considering we had three million soldiers fighting in the war with 570 000 injured but no in their infinite wisdom activision has decided to write the british out of world war ii and instead the closest we get is a rich kid from cameroon yes that's right kids you can be a german russian australian japanese french dutch indian luxembourg but apparently the british were not in world war ii so you will just have to play as a dude from cameroon i found this odd considering that the last time i read a history book that hadn't been burnt by fascists it said the british literally [ __ ] started world war ii and before anyone wigs out and has some kind of your racist woke react at me sergeant arthur kingsley is not british it's a deliberate snub and i read his bio he's a rich kid from cameroon who was educated at oxford and joined the british armed forces he's a posh kid who was educated abroad which is slightly strange considering the dhawala region he proposed to be from was a tribal fishing region at the time which was only just recovering from german occupation up to the end of the first world war he's one of the one percenters so basically his super rich parents either got rich under german occupation rich under british occupation or he was just some kind of thief because the cameroons repeatedly defied attempts to be ruled and wanted independence maybe his dad was just the jeff bezos of the cameroonian fishing village economy the character is ridiculous activision and sledgehammer went out of their way to make a deliberate point here about race by not having a british multiplayer operator it's a trap it's a trap set up to make people say what the [ __ ] you can't play as the british in a [ __ ] world war two video game andy woke horde shill content creators and sponsored social media idiots will be ready to pounce on anyone pointing out this insidious move and shout you're racist because you're upset that you can't play as a white british soldier even though he's actually cameroonian just saying well trust me there is a lot of racism going on here and the perpetrators are activision and sledgehammer games the character of sergeant arthur kingsley is 100 pure race-baiting it is a situation deliberately contrived to spark protestations about racial representation in video games it's a scenario where the producers of the game want to position themselves as holding the moral high ground whilst positioning their critics as intolerant racists but that's the thing about puffing your chest out race-baiting and whipping the crowd up into a frenzy nice people don't normally do that kind of thing and usually it leads to more hate being in the world not less it leads to more injustice in the world not their vision of utopia it's also incredibly embarrassing when the [ __ ] behind the moral posturing gets pointed out and here is the [ __ ] punchline sergeant after kingsley was inspired by a real soldier private sydney cornell from plymouth cornell joined the paris was posted to the seventh parachute battalion and was dropped behind german lines during the normandy invasions having a reputation for being as hard as nails he was awarded the distinguished conduct medal for his actions he spent over a month running through mortar and machine gun fire literally as a runner and also engaged in combat he was injured four times yet refused to be relieved to get medical treatment his citation included the words space does not permit a record of all of his feats as he distinguished himself in practically every action and fighting took place daily but [ __ ] him he doesn't support sledgehammer games narrative so let's make the guide some posh kid from cameroon who got a private education at oxford university instead it's easier to sell that's [ __ ] than the actual truth that is what the self-serving scam lords are like they are pretending to be woke they are black washing a world war two video game whilst whitewashing the real black soldier that served in the normandy landings maybe they thought private sydney cornell was too low rank not educated enough or too working class maybe they felt that having a character educated at oxford would be easier to sell whatever their reasons they're not pure of heart nor motivated by any genuine concern with telling authentic stories about the real black soldiers who served in the british army in world war ii this is marketing it shits on the legacy of blackberry soldiers and it's only done to race bait i don't think that's a very honorable way to honor a soldier do you sergeant arthur kingsley is the finn of the call of duty universe he is a character designed to deliberately trigger reaction based on ethnicity so you can label your critics as racists preemptively because let's face it even i know that stormtroopers were all supposed to be clones of that big new zealand fella so naturally everyone was going to react by saying how the [ __ ] can that storm trooper dude be black that's not motivated by racism it's a trap because they knew damn well they were deviating from their own historical law i have no skin in this game i choose my friends and associates based on their character not their race background political stances [ __ ] status or the contents of their underpants i am merely noting that when corporations pull the race card it's not because they give any shits about justice they give shits about shareholders besides i don't think call of duty has the credibility to damage the reputation of those who served in world war ii however much they impugn or misrepresent it they don't have the clout the disintegration of the world war ii narrative is a principal theme here seriously this is a world war ii game where they literally disintegrate and reassemble history into some kind of intersectional critical race theory [ __ ] narrative that would have us believe that a group of stunning and brave renegades literally won world war ii single-handedly by being diverse and ignoring the white patriarchy it's essentially star trek discovery in space only considerably less realistic the multiplayer can best be described as [ __ ] it's a glitchy woke exploiters and cheaters paradise with terrible spawns and even worse anti-cheat my most enduring memory is constantly having to watch out for enemy players to spawn right behind me in fact maybe that's the best way to describe this shit-house iteration of the pvp franchise it's a really good way to get shot repeatedly in the back it's basically like serving in the afghan army so yeah if you like getting stoned out of your mind and like being shot in the [ __ ] back before you've even figured out what the [ __ ] is happening then at least call of duty vanguard excels at being an afghan military simulator the gun rant to be honest i was going to have an enormous rant about the state of the weapons but [ __ ] it suffice it to say they're all pretty bad and on this episode we've nearly broken poor jonathan with some of the most cursed customizations that call of duty vanguards multiplayer has to offer god i think this is a garand what have they done to you all right we'll pause there there's just going to be a lot of pained wincing going on i think in this review wow where to start a browning bar m1918a2 you can tell from the magazine guides even if all the other features have been altered by some sadistic maniac i should qualify that 99 of my firearms knowledge comes from forgotten weapons and the holy grace that gun jesus bestows upon us all for those of you who don't know who that is gun jesus aka ian mccollum is without doubt the most critically accomplished expert and knowledgeable bearded left-handed firearms expert on the planet possibly the galaxy but even as a humble keyboard warrior i noted many issues with the weaponry that was problematic to be fair given the legacy of the franchise everyone's modern day obsession with gun mods and the fact that activision's entire psychometric manipulation strategy for monetization is entirely reliant on progression they basically could not be realistic with the guns what they're gonna do give you a stand gun and then after 5000 kills upgrade the wooden stock to a slightly worse but cheaper to make metal stock that would be realistic in fact in world war ii most of the time guns and weapons were replaced with slightly inferior weapons that were cheaper to mass produce or versions of existing weapons that were much cheaper to produce that's going to break your monetization strategy buy the new season pass and get the opportunity to grind for three months so we can take away your beloved thompson submachine gun and replace it with this shitty grease gun okay maybe not shitty since they were still used by abrams tanks crews right up to the gulf war i'm sure you get my point so yes you are fighting in world war ii nevertheless you have a full range of modern day optics and weapon mods all made to look kind of steampunk fact nearly all the weaponry ends up looking steampunk by the time you've unlocked all your preferred weapon mods only combined with lurid multi-coloured weapon skins to boot basically like someone did a steam punk sesame street mashup like i said they needed weapon attachment based progression because it's central to the game so i guess they tried their best to retain the mechanic and make the attachments look as oldie worldy as possible there was some totally avoidable nonsense however animations where someone uses their gun like a hammer and chisel bashing their victim and slamming the fragile replacement nine millimeter magazine into their smg was possibly the most stupid thing i've seen in a video game in a while stamp pressed metal magazines can stop feeding correctly if they just get a bit worn around the feed lips i'm pretty sure using them like a [ __ ] jackhammer and employing 200 plus pounds of force to ram them into the magazine well would reliably break them animations removing magazines without operating the release whilst doing kung fu was sillier than even i expected another animation where someone shoots across someone's legs with an smg at close range just to set them up for more kung fu yeah let's just accept that it's a modern day call of duty game made in the current era and accept the fact that a lot of the operator animations are probably more inspired by cosplay than combat let's just say much unnecessary racking of slides was done this day i would note there is no lee enfield rifle in the multiplayer i would just follow that away under video game publishers hate the british now there were a few annoying examples of anachronistic firearms practices it all just got very tactical without being self-consciously aware that many modern firearms techniques are indeed modern there are standard dogmas taught as recently as the 80s that we laugh about now so think about the crazy [ __ ] they were doing in world war ii in this game i saw a lot of very professional two-handed pistol shooting no t-cupping or shooting single-handed when in reality a lot of people used to shoot pistols in world war ii like they were doing olympic target shooting then again fixing that [ __ ] would require more character animation a go cost the injection of modern combat tactics into the franchise frankly just added to the hyper real steampunk [ __ ] historically revision sense of nonsense within the game i mean all the guns are balanced to fit pvp metrics and have very little to do with reality anyway so frankly we shouldn't be so shocked that some hipster gun controls zombie wrongly categorized the b-a-r as and i quote an assault rifle the weapons animations weren't particularly bad and the sounds were not bad either it's 2021 and this is one of the longest running and most lucrative franchises on earth you would assume they had worked this [ __ ] out by now frankly what can i say guys it's call of duty admittedly the most ridiculous one yet at that you can rely on the guns to make bang bang noises and look pretty and that's about it frankly given how much money this game has made bobby kotick you'd think he could take a break from his busy schedule of making death threats to his personal assistant threatening to destroy people complaining about sexual harassment by his pilot and worrying about why his name was found in jeffrey epstein's little black book to spend a few hours making sure a bit more time and attention was spent on the current state of the franchise the campaign was really the highlight of the whole experience for me i frankly felt honored to be in a position where i had the opportunity to experience such a truly dreadful butchering of history and the total disrespect of millions of combatants and civilians who died in the war the complete blind insensitivity and lack of empathy is truly a wonder to behold imagine ben and jerry is setting up a stall at the auschwitz birkenau state museum and naming a selection of new ice cream flavors with funny nazi-based names minter motherland ravensbruck choo choo krakaldo that should give you a rough idea of how [ __ ] disrespectful sledgehammer has been to everyone involved in world war ii they basically recrafted the story of world war ii to service the agenda of a very particular identity-based political perspective letting all of us ignorant racist bigots know who really won the war and you guessed it it certainly wasn't the patriarchal mainstream allied forces but it wasn't because of british commanders or mighty tanks [Music] [Music] but more of this propagandist [ __ ] later the campaign feels more like a point-and-click interactive puzzle game than a shooter it is contrived constraining and cocked up the entire [ __ ] campaign feels like a giant glitch in the matrix the game world they created here warps reality whenever it is required to fit their little storytelling exercises they want you to go a certain way the bushes turn into walls they want tension they give you two bullets and not a single soldier has a gun or ammo they want you to behave a certain way then the npcs won't drop their weapons or the weapons just despawn they want atmosphere they scale back your walking speed so you are forced to creep slowly and admire the fancy lighting effects they probably spent weeks discussing in meetings at the local vegan cafe or the cushioned freeform thinking zone most of the time the game feels like it's controlling the player didn't feel much sense of agency at all the level design is farcical particularly in the jungle scenes you're channeled down these very restricted routes because the bushes and undergrowth are solid obstructions they say sneak through the jungle but really they only let you sneak down the path at a pace they dictate go too fast you get spotted wait a bit then sneak down the path and you're fine in fact i've found numerous points in the game where it wasn't actually behaving like a game at all there were instances where there was no problem-solving skills employed there was no interpreting the information working out what to do no actual game processes going on the game segment just wanted you to do a certain thing the way they wanted it done there was no way to tell what that thing was so you just had to use trial and error to see how the game director thought you were supposed to do it and most of the time they just wanted you to move slowly the game is [ __ ] boring most of the campaign is run on rail segments where you have virtually zero agency or control punctuated by incredibly long boring cutscene segments where you have literally zero agency or control think i'm exaggerating well here is a part of the game where ironically humorously or just because they're pissed taking smarmy sneering cretins they literally put rails on the ground to show you where to run this is dumb video game making of legendary proportions the game is so [ __ ] boring i started organizing chores and personal [ __ ] jobs around the cut scenes when a game is so tiresome that housework provides a fun little break from the [ __ ] game you know you're in trouble i know that was not hyperbole i would line up jobs to do during the relentless barrage of cutscenes wash my balaclava order more cable ties sharpened my knives i was literally getting up and doing stuff whilst the cinematics droned away in the background vanguard also boasts one of the worst boss fights ever the fight with steiner is a master class in inconsistent game mechanics it's so borked it doesn't follow its own rule set you're supposed to sneak up behind the guy and use distraction but because the section is so heavily scripted half the time he always knows where you are and chases you around like a rat and the distract skill only seems to draw him towards you and he beat the fight by just hanging around until eventually wandered past me and i could stab him in the back if there'd been a cheek code i would have used it to bypass this annoying joyless piece of [ __ ] quest don't give people a stealth quest with a distract mechanic but the stealth doesn't work properly the distract doesn't work at all and you have to try it 20 times just to work out what part is scripted so you don't die pointlessly this is amateur hour activision for [ __ ] sake in fact this is a recurring theme with this game and to my review it's the issue of non-experts just like a lot of this game seems like nobody knows anything about war world war ii combat and weapons the game also suffers because frequently there's no evidence that they even know much about video games games have rule sets like movies have rule sets you don't give the player a set of rules to play by then change them on the fly to suit your little storytelling efforts especially not when the story is [ __ ] too this is like a dysfunctional interactive [ __ ] bedtime story where someone is trying to bore you to sleep the problems with the poor gameplay boring segments lack of agency and juvenile game construction was further amplified by the extreme heavy leaning into cinematic cutscenes this is not a point and click adventure game it's [ __ ] cod i'm famous for making overly long tedious videos so this following statement comes from a position of authority from a well-known expert on boring people this game is dreadfully boring and i should know the game flip-flops between sections where you have virtually no agency and sections where you have zero agency and you just sit there and watch it made the game experience feel more like a low-budget knock-off interactive training program there are people sitting in [ __ ] cubicles at amazon warehouses doing training courses that had more fun than me i warn you now you will spend half the game sitting there watching [ __ ] cinematics the music is good but of course it's good it's bear [ __ ] mccreery of battlestar galactica fame and as many of you know battlestar galactica had one of the best soundtracks of any tv show ever his music was so good the soundtrack got its own fan following for [ __ ] sake they've thrown live performances just to please his adoring supporters but epic as it was even bear mccreary's soundtrack was not enough to save this game i mean how could it you can play gabba techno at your nan's funeral but ain't gonna turn it into a [ __ ] rave sadly however bear mccreary's soundtrack might end up being the only good thing about this game actually that might be a little bit tight-fisted of me they also cast thee now legendary dominic monahan naturalist actor hobbit he did the voice of how some fury yannick richter personally i'm always slightly suspicious of anyone called yannick based on my experiences of both nazis and ubisoft community managers and wherever those two categories overlap that said despite him giving it his all richter the character he played was a cartoon cut out pantomime nazi and not the sort of character a grown-up would write it was a sort of nazi character you'd expect in willy wonka's chocolate factory or a children's cartoon only with slightly more killing obviously laura bailey is in the game because she's in every video game she was in 15 different video games just in 2010 this is definitely worthy of further investigation but i have started to become aware of the fact that she is literally in nearly every mainstream aaa video game doing at least one role maybe it's something to do with her husband's production company or the fact that he runs the critical role foundation because let's face it that logo just screams illuminati the ai is terrible the level design is terrible it's all terrible and i swear they also have spoofed bullet hits i can't prove this and i'm not wasting any time trying to but there were times where i strongly suspect i was getting hit by bullets that ain't coming out of real npc's guns one time i was completely behind cover but still got struck and i assume this was for dramatic effect oh and the companion npc's ai is even dumber than the enemies at one point in the game i almost got pushed into triggering the next event by a [ __ ] bot companion and on another occasion i almost died because a bot pushed me out of cover if there is a thing in this game somehow they managed to find a way to [ __ ] it up i guess it's time for the big political rant i think this game is a trap in the same way the last of us 2 is a trap it's a game that pushes a very particular narrative and agenda denigrates any characters that don't align with that agenda and if anyone calls them out for making a shitwoke story they will no doubt be immediately accused of being everything evil in the world and i guess the problematic politicisation of this game was summed up best by this personal experience when i was playing the chapter operation tonga i literally sighed and thought oh great now they're renaming world war ii operations with woke sounding names then i found out that operation tonga was real and it's not in africa it's in polynesia and there you have it when your video game is so painfully woke that someone who is sympathetic to the untold stories of the commonwealth and female soldiers who fought in the second world war thinks you are making [ __ ] up that's a serious credibility issue when your crt dripping story can't even present facts without them being treated with skepticism then that indicates that your video game comes across like propaganda because this game is political propaganda cynical propaganda at that because activision doesn't believe in these principles it just thinks it will help its image and sales and unfortunately in their attempts to amp up the call of duty franchise's political credentials they rewrote history disrespected millions of people who lost their lives and turned what should have been a historic video game into a finger wagging lecture about inclusivity and diversity [ __ ] these guys i played for a video game not a sermon i support some of the principles espoused in this game in principle and i think racism bigotry and ignorant discrimination are the habits of [ __ ] and people with hate in their hearts but however noble your cause if you prosecute that cause dishonestly using lies censoring history and portraying anyone not on your team as inferior then you're just as much of a villain as any other oppressor you just happen to be on a different side once you deny your audience truth and reason you become a manipulator you're just another trickster trying to coerce someone into a particular way of thinking and cause of action by denying them a reasonable opportunity to make an informed choice the problem with the wokeness in vanguard is primarily all about the intensity of the wokeness it's the unrelenting all-pervasive all-encompassing nature of the politically correct design i got what they were trying to do with arthur kingsley [ __ ] i have frequently said that there are many true stories about the women commonwealth soldiers and the u.s african-american regiments that needs to be told arthur kingsley is kind of an analogue of several world war one and world war ii black officers in the british military it was also nice to see a black us army unit in the pacific theater i have made videos where i explain how these stories should be in video games and how they would represent a more honest presentation of the history of the war well i guess they say be careful what you wish for i certainly did not predict that not only would a publisher include a lot of these stories but they would try and include all the stories and try and warp the history of world war ii in such a way so that it appears to the audience that only those stories matter incidentally was taking lots of swipes at both the audience and any characters that fought outside of the video games special protected groups the problem isn't that they tried to include some of this stuff in the game the problem is that it's all they [ __ ] do it's such unrelenting inclusivity and diversity that the game morphs into identity politics propaganda in one gaming session i played the part of a stunning and brave russian girl who turns out to be a better physical fighter than all the men in her city and the german frontline assault infantry and then has to rescue all the men from captivity then i cut to a scene where a black british officer is saving his white squad only to transition to a scene where my hispanic rear gunner has to save my white cracker ass from the japanese only to have both of us rescued by an african-american army unit who promptly berate me for my lack of music knowledge call me white boy question whether i've ever seen and i quote a negro before make a joke that i probably assume they eat bugs and reptiles and then just to consolidate my status as being part of the problem i refer to them as coloreds then i get told off by their officer and insulted by one of the men then my character basically demonstrates physical cowardice they very literally paint me as an ignorant prejudicial racist by no other virtue than the fact that the character is white you have to see the irony in that right there's no empathy here there's no authenticity here it's like being transported to the jungles of the pacific theater and then being rescued by a bunch of modern day angry activists who incidentally have no qualms about directing a string of racist insults towards you this really is activists meets world war ii and does not honor or do service to the real 93rd regiment that these cartoon characters are alleged to portray it's absolutely unrelenting wokery at the highest [ __ ] order it's not that any one particularly woke scene is conspicuously bad the problem is that when you create an entire narrative out of woke vignettes of diversity inclusivity and progressive statements whilst constantly throwing in put downs on the outsider the end result is basically a white male ignorant simulator the cis white male characters in this game only seem to be present at all so that they can be saved or rescued by a woman or people of color or just as routinely killed by cartoon villain nazis and japanese or just be [ __ ] leaders in fact it was kind of strange how the cis white male characters in this game were either flawed shamed or killed off i can't stress this point enough there are plenty of parts of the story that i've wanted to see in a war game i just didn't want all the ubiquitous world war ii background removed and entirely replaced with just painfully politically correct [ __ ] i [ __ ] love salt and vinegar on my chips but i wouldn't want to eat a packet of just salt and vinegar the story of vanguard is a giant serving of salt drenched in vinegar only they forgot to cook you any fish and chips and that's why the game feels like a salty bitter chore to get through because they didn't tell the untold stories i wanted to hear they remastered them with a voice of modern angry bitter progressive politics and pushed the [ __ ] pie of revisionist historical racial justice in front of me and said swallow this white boy and it gets even worse because shortly after all of this [ __ ] show even the australian guy starts calling out the british army as a bunch of colonialist [ __ ] and in the scene after that they are mocking the british army and portraying the british officer class as idiotic incompetent buffoons it's a relentless anti-establishment treaties that rags on anyone or anything that is not part of their little special forces unit woke force one and if you think this is just me griping well check this out even kataku thinks this game is misguided and demeans the real world war ii veterans by rewriting history kutaku saying you've gone too far is like having stalin telling you to chill out with the executions vanguard is an ideological sermon that masquerades as a game it glorifies war justifies war crimes against your enemy dehumanizes the other side it disparages white soldiers yet whilst trying to present itself as a lofty treaties on racial justice and feminism but treats the japanese as a sub stereotype element of the game this is not social justice it's social programming it's politics disguised as fable so yeah white people bad japanese bad perversely on point considering until only recently the monsters of the internet that professed to be about racial justice considered racial hate against asians as well as caucasians completely legitimate do not let that slip by you recently people have been dredging up historic social media activity for a lot of these racial justice activists and discovering troves of asian hate comments very bizarre that these same prejudices are neatly mapped onto the narrative of this game oh yeah and all the fascists in the game are naturally represented with the same degree of authenticity as goons out of a cartoon and just to hammer this point home the narrative in this game is trying to assert its moral authority over the audience and present itself as the correct way to view the world yet the supposed heroes in this game beat and then murder a desk clerk in cold blood they execute prisoners they take another captive dowsing gasoline and burn him alive without batting an eyelid sure the characters were nazi [ __ ] but jesus christ cold blooded executions as standard operating procedures and necklacing really necklacing i hope the symbolism of necklacing is not lost on you vanguard trivializes war crimes glorifies war and portrays combat as a big lol the subtext of this story is that the enemy is subhuman and therefore does not deserve to be treated like a human now where have i heard this before oh yeah it was the guys behind the holocaust coincidentally the villains here the game fundamentally has no integrity it reminded me of far cry [ __ ] to a degree in as much as they clearly did not hire any experts sure they probably hired lots of experts on critical race theory activism intersectional feminism hipsters and story writers with their pronouns tattooed on their [ __ ] foreheads but when making a world war 2 combat game it's apparently a good idea to hire someone who knows at least half a [ __ ] about war and history the game is shockingly bad when it comes to making sense you see a guy using a flamethrower casually on a dude forefoot in front of him without a care in the world standing out in the open out of cover you see comedy nazis that talk like something out of a sub indiana jones movie you see clunky old two-seater attack planes out dogfighting japanese zeroes veteran pilots what the actual [ __ ] was that about setting aside all the continuous and ubiquitous political preachings in this game let us not forget the single biggest message in the plot world war ii was just a warm up it was just the first stage of the nazi plan to inject and spread fascism into the world they're still out there they still walk amongst us and must be rooted out like rats the hunt for the nazis never ends this is the sort of crackpot [ __ ] i read on twitter today this notion that the enemies are hiding everywhere fascists need to be hunted down the fight against the fascist enemy within is never ending this is propaganda 101 in the previous call of duty game black ops cold war the soviet defector yuri besmanev was featured in the trailer discussing amongst other things the soviet long-term strategy for disintegrating western values using the techniques referred to as active measures active measures uses such techniques as disinformation propaganda deception sabotage destabilization subversion espionage oh the [ __ ] irony that a franchise that was referencing active measures in its previous game is now responsible for a perfect cultural example of how that would theoretically manifest in the entertainment industry and i'm only saying theoretically to be polite i don't think they made this game this way with any deliberate intent to further this agenda i think they did it out of selfishness because they were avoiding backlash because they thought playing the woke card would service their own interests not that it matters why they did it the issue is that they did do it they told you about active measures and then practically in the next breath produced the perfect example of a video game bending the knee bending to social pressure and bending to the will of gatekeeping activist journalists just like someone smashing a shot window to impress the ss observers or someone who helds abuse at someone during a maoist struggle session [Applause] oops wrong clip the point is not that they sincerely believe this [ __ ] that they're peddling it's the fact they are contributing to the societal atmosphere where everyone feels like they must give in to the pressure that they must acquiesce because everyone else is giving in to this propagandist [ __ ] the disaster is coming closer and closer the danger is real i'm not gonna lie i try and avoid using words like woke as a lazy go-to word to describe the politics in video games but i probably used it more times in this video than i have all year what the [ __ ] am i supposed to do i can't spend five minutes trying to qualify a more precise description every time this game gets woke because it's woke to its very core it's a finely crafted monument to wokeness i think it's very important when discussing war to remember a few lessons that were hard earned we have the geneva convention for a reason you can't just deny your enemy humanity and basic fair treatment by the sole virtue of them being your enemy similarly behind nearly all societal atrocities is the foundation work of dehumanizing your enemy we live in strange and violent times and i frankly think it's despicable and hypocritical to make a game that preaches about feminism and racial justice while simultaneously glorifying war being racist and burning your prisoners alive there is no deep meaning in this story it's really just a british 1940s propaganda war movie where the traditional two-dimensional patriotic characters have been swapped out for one-dimensional woke characters i'm surprised this game didn't [ __ ] with a hammer and sickle and a black lives matter sticker slapped on the front instead of telling people to hate the germans and the japanese it's hate cis white men the fascists the nazis actually and the japanese and under all the propaganda it's a [ __ ] game made on the cheap call of duty vanguard is not merely rewriting history to service a modern political critical race theory agenda it's the woke equivalent of mine camp for gamers imagine esops fables rewritten by a trained marxist yeah she'll do her words not mine we uh are trained marxists i feel like i have a front row seat at the death of a franchise this is call of duty's battlefield vagina moment they traded what little integrity they had left for a ticket on the identity politics express because they assume the future is going to be even more nuts than the social media which burnings we have right now i'm not so sure that's going to be the case it honestly occurred to me that activision deliberately wrote off call of duty this year not kidding the last year had seen people cancel just for making sense or citing facts business is burnt down for not taking the knee hard enough there has been a pandemic of wokeness critical race theory and intersectional feminism and in the middle of this progressive [ __ ] storm activision gets sucked into a scandal about accusations of sexism abuse in the workplace and operating a five-star date rape drinking den hotel suite at video game events activision has a perception problem in the middle of a propaganda war i think they might have just decided to make this game as woke as humanly possible as some kind of pr stunt knowing full well it would fall flat on its arse and decided the best way to reduce the financial hit was just to put as little effort into it as possible and then maybe target the whales later in the year with the micro transactions maybe they also know that the gatekeepers in the propaganda ministry of mainstream video game journalism will give them some positive reviews just because they played the identity politics card because those [ __ ] would give a 10 out of 10 rating to a snuff movie if it was progressive and socialist enough the game's a mess the political propaganda in it is horrible zombies is a low effort asset flip call of duty vanguard is cynical junk call of duty vanguard demonstrates comprehensive and far-reaching levels of failure it fails at being a story and fails even harder at being a video game the game frequently berates the player character and sometimes actually treats you like an ignorant racist it's a video game that insults the player's character and intelligence vanguard's syphilitic failure permeates every pore of this game call of duty vanguard is the video game equivalent of a school classroom where they make all the white kids sit at one side and tell them they're the oppressors who are responsible for all the injustice in the world vanguard is a [ __ ] game on every conceivable level of analysis and fails at everything it attempts it has therefore rightly earned its place in the pantheon of terribly [ __ ] video games standing proudly between a torn down statue of fallout 70 [ __ ] and a urine stained statue of battlefield vagina and it is highly likely this will be the only award the game ever wins outside of worst video games of 2021 or whatever deviant awards i invent for it in this year's award ceremony activision and sledgehammer congratulations you have failed but for now good luck and happy hunting [Music]

Channel: 21Kiloton

Views: 341,248

Keywords: Vanguard, Call of Duty Vanguard, Call of Duty Vanguard Review, Call of Duty Review

Id: 5wiA2jfHLHs

Length: 69min 42sec (4182 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021