Dojmy z alfy Call of Duty: Vanguard » Vortex

PlayStation players have the first opportunity to try out the new Call of Duty: Vanguard in multiplayer this weekend. For this purpose, its developers chose the Champion Hill mode, which they say is an evolution of the Gunfight mode, which first appeared in Modern Warfare from 2019. Of course, we were also curious about how the novelty is played and started testing. Unfortunately, we did not get the most positive impressions from the alpha.

The joke is that it doesn’t really matter so much how many matches you win in a row if you lose lives too fast.

First of all, it must be said that this article will not be an exhaustive description of the mode itself. Twice the developers have done this very thoroughly, for example on the official website, including all possible details and tips. I will just briefly remind you that Champion Hill is a multi-arena survival tournament that is currently played in doubles and threes. There will also be solos in the full version. Each team has a certain number of lives / respawns and they compete gradually in short sixty-second matches, which are basically just small arenas within one big map. Gradually, you lose respawny, or you capture some, and teams that run in parallel fall out of the tournament until there is only one winner left.

The joke is that it doesn’t really matter so much how many matches you win in a row if you lose lives too fast. Or if you just lose in the fourth round and suddenly lose most of the respawns you still have left. Because lives don’t fill up automatically between rounds. At the beginning of the game and once every few rounds, you can retrofit in the central zone for the money earned. You can buy new weapons, explosives, perks, armor plates, but also extra life. Even directly in combat, you can also invest in weapon upgrades.

A detailed description would be unnecessarily complicated and you will quickly find your way around in practice. I see the problem more in what this regime represents. If I turned it on for the first time in the full version and saw it as another of many alternatives, it would not offend me in any way. I can already say with certainty that it would not be my favorite mode, but maybe I would like to distract myself from time to time. It is very fast (at least in theory), it is necessary to make decisions in it often, there is still almost everything at stake. The difference between the first and last place, or elimination can be represented by two or three unsuccessful respawnas.

But it’s not exactly what I imagined I would see first when Call of Duty returned to World War II. And I don’t think I’m alone. While there’s no doubt that this is Call of Duty when playing, World War II isn’t at all. So yes, the players are so dressed, there are basically the weapons you expect, and you are moving in an environment that is supposed to imitate war. But this is not, I believe, a representative example of multiplayer, which the authors are otherwise preparing. One would expect developers to bet on safety and show some classic mode on some of the purely war maps. Experiments may occur later. As if the first taste of Call of Duty: WWII was the Anthropoid map in One Shot mode. No, wait, that would be more interesting.

There are wooden props and scenery all around, so you feel more like in a movie studio.

In Champion Hill, you can’t even choose your character at the beginning. It’s alpha, of course, but it contributes to the overall confused impression. You don’t meet on the normal battlefield of World War II, but in a kind of training camp, the individual parts of which only imitate real places – airports, markets, railway stations. Everything has a strange brown tinge, which on the one hand does not suit the game and, most importantly, thanks to it, the fight is quite confusing. The characters and the environment merge into one. And there’s no double view of the game at all.

Damage to arenas is persistent, so it persists across rounds. There is a lot to destroy on the map, usually various wooden obstacles suitable for covering. But when you return to the same place, it is already reminiscent of a colander. As a result, the mode intended as aggressive and fast is played by the most successful by simply camping in the most advantageous position and waiting for you to get hit by them. And this is also helped by the Call of Duty classic – submachine guns have the accuracy of a sniper rifle and the effectiveness of a shotgun. So it kills basically instantly across the entire map.

To hell with blood on the screen, which will only hasten your demise.

But in the end, there’s one more thing that turns me on the most. As if the image is no longer difficult to read, during the shootings it turns into a festival of flashes, filters and effects. In all games, I get a stupid red screen when injured, as if you didn’t notice or a less invasive indicator wasn’t enough. But here, even with a small intervention, apart from the injury itself, you will basically get one big red “penalty” over the whole picture, so that you can’t concentrate at the moment when you need it most of all. To hell with blood on the screen, which will only hasten your demise.

And that doesn’t tell me frustration, I didn’t actually do badly in the news. I just don’t like a lot of things about it and I don’t think it’s a happy first playable show. The authors had to add at least one classic mode and a map to the menu. However, we have to wait until September for that. The seventh is the unveiling of multiplayer, and from September 10, various beta rounds will gradually start, as we informed about it earlier.