CALL OF DUTY BLACK OPS ZOMBIE STRATEGY SERIES

We get to know Wade Jackson on the deck of a carrier during the Battle of Midway, and Aussie explosives expert Lucas Riggs shows up in North Africa just before the Battle of El Alamein. Next we travel to Stalingrad for some backstory on Polina Petrova, the groupвЂ™s steely Russian sniper whoвЂ™s out for revenge. ArthurвЂ™s begins with an airborne drop into Merville on D-Day, which culminates in a thrilling assault on a complex of coastal artillery. Their sessions with Richter provide the jumping-off points for introductory stories for each character. This all goes disastrously wrong, and the whole gang winds up in a cell beneath the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, where theyвЂ™re interrogated one by one by a weaselly Nazi officer named Jannick Richter (played by an unnervingly restrained Dominic Monaghan). The Red Army is approaching Berlin, and British paratrooper Arthur Kingsley has been sent with a hand-picked team of hardasses to swipe some super-secret Nazi plan called Operation Phoenix out of a sub pen. The story begins on a train outside Hamburg in the closing hours of the war in Europe. The вЂњbirth of the Special ForcesвЂќ stuff that Activision has been hinting at in the leadup to VanguardвЂ™s release is mostly nonsense: this is a comic book origin story for a team of commandos who wouldвЂ™ve been at home alongside Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare. ItвЂ™s WarzoneвЂ™s madcap goofiness, more than any Ken Burns-style documentary footage, that informs VanguardвЂ™s pulpy campaign. Zombies roam the land and Cold War-era spies try to stop the nuclear apocalypse, while everyone else is busy murdering each other forever and ever. ItвЂ™s an alternate dimension with its own timeline and history, a metaverse made up of caffeine- and sugar-infused hyperviolence. вЂњIвЂ™m going to go play Call of DutyвЂќ has long since become a meaningless phrase, since вЂCall of DutyвЂ™ is a label thatвЂ™s been smeared out across a startling array of different experiences, which now all somehow plug into the massive, shared world of Call of Duty: Warzone. LetвЂ™s pause momentarily to marvel at what a profoundly strange thing Call of Duty is in the year 2021. The overall effect, however, is that Sledgehammer has managed to make WWII, as a setting, feel fresh again вЂ“ and thank goodness. Vanguard takes a couple wild swings that donвЂ™t pan out all that well, and plays it perhaps too safe in other areas.

CALL OF DUTY BLACK OPS ZOMBIE STRATEGY SERIES

Call of Duty: Vanguard вЂ“ which you can buy here вЂ“ is the sixth game in the long-running FPS series to be set in the Second World War, but itвЂ™s the first that feels like itвЂ™s doing its own thing. Saving Private Ryan cast a long shadow over videogames, and only now вЂ“ more than 20 years after SpielbergвЂ™s film debuted вЂ“ are games finally finding their way out of its desaturated vision of the Normandy landings.

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