Call of Duty: Vanguard

Call of Duty: Vanguard is a first-person action shooter from Sledgehammer Games, the eighteenth entry in the main Call of Duty series. The game takes players into the final months of World War II and follows an international team of soldiers across different 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 themselves between missions. Alongside the singleplayer campaign, Vanguard offers an extensive multiplayer with a range of maps and game modes, a system of seasonal updates, and a cooperative zombies mode that directly continues the story from the previous Call of Duty: Cold War and World at War entries.

The PlayStation 5 version makes full use of next-gen performance – it offers higher resolution, a more stable frame rate, and in multiplayer also support for higher frames per second, aided by fast SSD storage that significantly cuts loading times compared to PS4. The PS5 version also supports haptic feedback and adaptive triggers on the DualSense controller, which flesh out the feel of firing individual weapons and the sense of each gun in general.

In terms of content, the PS5 version is identical to other platforms – the same campaign, the same multiplayer maps, and the same zombies mode. Thanks to cross-play and cross-progression, players can also play with friends on PS4, Xbox, and PC, and can transfer their progress back to an older console without any issues if needed.

Faster loading and smoother performance show up mainly in multiplayer, where shorter intervals between matches and a more stable frame rate make precise shooting and quick reactions easier. In the campaign, the higher technical level mainly enhances the atmosphere of individual missions without changing their content or structure compared to the older console generation. The choice between a mode prioritizing visual quality and one targeting performance also gives players the option to set up the game according to their own priorities.

Why play it: For players who care mainly about smooth multiplayer, the PS5 version brings shorter waits between matches and a choice between image quality and performance, without changing the campaign's content compared to the older generation.