Call of Duty: Vanguard, tried the alpha on PlayStation 4
Call of Duty
Call of Duty: Vanguard begins to be talked about a few months after launch. Activision, despite the thousand controversies of recent months, remains focused on its production line and with the new chapter of COD wants to bring players back to World War II, a beloved setting that over the years has counted several chapters of the series. Although the beta is expected on multiple platforms, the first contact with Vanguard takes place at PlayStation, with a cross-platform alpha between Playstation 4 and the new generation of consoles.The way to promote the title is in line with what has been done in the past and instead of focusing on the campaign or letting the zombies test, competitive multiplayer is put in the spotlight, although with Hill of Champions, a mode unedited, instead of a more solid and concrete deathmatch. Little, in short, to get a precise idea of the production, but enough to understand the direction taken by the developers. Can we be satisfied with what we've seen in this Call of Duty: Vanguard test?
Classic gameplay, with some flaws
The new COD promises a blast from the past Multiplayer returns, but to make us try it properly Activision chooses a rather unique mode where sixteen players, divided into eight teams of two components, must kill themselves until their lives are exhausted. It's a game system that's ready to reward skill and strategy, thus setting aside weapon customization, crate randomness, and even point streaks as we know them. At the beginning of the match we will be rewarded with 500 dollars, a sum sufficient to change weapon with another preset or buy plates and some minor perk. All elements, however, very familiar to COD players, who will be at ease here from the very first moments of play.Once the pre-match is over, the matches begin. These are quick one-minute clashes, during which the goal is to eliminate the players of the opposing couple as many times as possible in order to gradually gnaw the twelve lives at their disposal in a sort of mini tournament with direct matches. During the game, every action earns you dollars, such as getting headshots, becoming saviors and, much more trivially, killing. Dollars can be invested in upgrading the weapon used by leveling it up, adding pre-set equipment and improving its performance for a total of eight improvements. Alternatively, you can decide to save every single penny and squander everything during the various intervals in the central hub where the possibility of buying better perks or devastating equipment will return. Suffice it to say that with $ 25,000, we assure you of a blunder, it will be possible to buy a missile with which you will automatically win the game by instantly eliminating all the other players.
Big maps, maybe too much
A good variety of weapons, ready to pierce anything The maps are interconnected and basically played in a giant circular arena, a curious situation that allows you to see the other fields in the distance and the other players. While you can't hit them, you can also hear the shots from firefights that don't involve you. Nice in theory, much less in practice since the sounds will only become an additional annoyance as you try to hear the footsteps of your direct contenders.The general confusion is the element that bothered us most while we were playing to Vanguard with overly intrusive smoke effects, heat waves that obscure the view excessively and a blur that just doesn't suit a title that should give clarity in reading the action as the main element. In short, you shoot in total chaos paying attention only to the cursor of the hits, hoping to get the target's position right: a truly unsustainable situation in the long term. It almost seems that the title, at least for the moment, was designed to be more scenic than fun, but it is a choice that we did not appreciate.
As for the gameplay, however, the movements have returned to the basics, with extremely limited jumps, short slips and tactical shots that remove the weapon from the front exposing you completely to enemy fire. This significantly favors camping which in this mode without constant UAVs buzzing overhead emerges as the most relevant problem.
On PlayStation 4 the models of the soldiers and the increase in destructibility in the arenas due to the possibility of destroying wooden planks scattered everywhere are very appreciable. Perforation of materials has also been improved, with hits going through walls and other covers with extreme ease, albeit with very little damage. Remaining on the subject of damage, the Time to Kill (TTK) is relatively low, with an exponential growth only in the presence of the aforementioned armor plates, a reason that would also suggest the absence in the final version of the veteran mode this year. SBMM seems to be back for a better match balance, love and hate of those who usually spend their evenings on Call of Duty multiplayer.
The Hill of Champions mode did not impress us particularly. It felt badly balanced in general and in favor of a wait-only game method that doesn't quite fit what we are looking for in a Call of Duty. Little, of course, to draw the final conclusions on a title that will have a multitude of contents at launch, but some defects, such as visual confusion while pulling the trigger, we hope will be solved or at least filed in its final version. Instead, we appreciated the return to a less frenetic pace of movement for competitive multiplayer, which could bring some satisfaction to longtime fans looking for a blast from the past.
