Call of Duty: Vanguard

Call of Duty: Vanguard is a first-person action shooter from Sledgehammer Games, the eighteenth installment in the main Call of Duty series. The game takes the player into the final months of World War II and follows an international team of soldiers across various battlefields - from North Africa, through a Pacific island, to the final assault on Berlin. The campaign is told through the memories of individual characters and emphasizes their personal stories as much as the battles between missions. Besides the single-player campaign, Vanguard offers an extensive multiplayer with numerous maps and game modes, a system of seasonal updates, and a cooperative zombies mode that directly continues the story from the previous series installments Call of Duty: Cold War and World at War.

The PC version offers the technically highest ceiling of all platforms - unlimited frame rate, support for resolutions higher than 4K, fully adjustable graphics quality and ray tracing, including the ability to fine-tune performance to match your own build. The game runs on the Battle.net platform and uses the Ricochet anti-cheat system, meant to protect multiplayer matches from cheating.

Content-wise, the PC edition is identical to the console versions - the same campaign, the same multiplayer maps and game modes, and the same zombies mode. Thanks to cross-play and cross-progression, PC players can play with friends on PlayStation and Xbox and share their progress across platforms regardless of where they happen to be playing.

Given that Call of Duty's multiplayer has long been prone to cheating, Activision places increased emphasis on the PC version's Ricochet anti-cheat system, which runs at the operating system's kernel level. For players this means somewhat stricter requirements for installing the game, but in exchange also protection against the most common forms of cheating in online matches. Players with a more powerful build can also choose a higher target frame rate for a smoother experience in fast firefights.

Why play: Because of the kernel-level Ricochet anti-cheat, the PC version places higher demands on installation, but in exchange offers better protection against cheating and, for players with a powerful build, a higher frame rate too.