People like to give Call of Duty a lot of crap for being a "copy/paste" series in many of its design aspects. While I wouldn't fully agree with that sentiment, I could see where people were coming from. Now, with Call of Duty: Vanguard, the charade is up, as this is clearly the most cookie-cutter Call of Duty release to date. If it isn't plainly obvious by looking at footage alone, Vanguard looks and feels like a Modern Warfare 2019 reskin, which is the crippling flaw, here. Vanguard's development looked to have been an absolute mess with the major CoD schedule upset last year - not to mention the massive controversies coming out of Activision and its studios - so it's not surprising that we received a half-baked game considering the time constraints.

Even when looking at the constraints on which this game was made, Vanguard is still a buggy, boring, rehash of ever-growing tropes infecting the current cinematic AAA video game space. Even if the latest Call of Duty "plays" fine, it fails to provide anything original or interesting to this tired formula, despite all the empty marketing buzzwords claiming the opposite.