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Call of Duty: Vanguard continues the series trend of short campaigns by telling a story that should only take players a few hours to beat. Footage for Vanguard's campaign leading up to release has depicted the game as the World At War sequel fans never got, dropping players back into the nightmares of WWII. The game's narrative takes place during the end of WWII and focuses on an alternate timeline where the Nazis are trying to develop a Fourth Reich, which would have spelled disaster for the Allied Powers.
Call of Duty: Vanguard’s campaign places players in the role of four different soldiers during World War II that are part of an international special task force called Task Force One. The main goal of Task Force One throughout the game is to stop the secret Nazi initiative called Project Phoenix and take down its leader Herman William Freissinger. The special group of soldiers working to stop the Nazis feels like Call of Duty’s take on Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, albeit with a more serious tone in comparison to the film’s snarky humor.
During the course of the campaign, players will take on missions set before the present storyline that highlights how each character in Task Force One became heroes in their own right, as well as providing insight into what caused them to join up with one another to take on their covert operation. This narrative structure allows Sledgehammer Games to take players to key moments in WWII history like D-Day and The Battle of Stalingrad while still maintaining a story that makes logical sense in the long run. Call of Duty: Vanguard’s story also helps familiarize players with some of the weapons and equipment that they will see in the Multiplayer and Zombie modes after completing the story, as well as utilizing the destructive environments Vanguard showed off prior to release.
How Long Call of Duty: Vanguard's Story Is
Call of Duty: Vanguard tells its story across nine different chapters, each running about 30-45 minutes apiece. That places the total runtime for a playthrough at somewhere between 5-7 hours, which is a pretty brief endeavor considering the scale of the story the game is trying to tell. The short length isn’t a detriment to the game, however, as it allows the developers to skip out on unnecessary filler and dig straight into the heart of the conflict without the narrative overstaying its welcome.
Short campaigns have always been a staple of the Call of Duty franchise, so Vanguard’s story only lasting as long as it does isn’t a big surprise. Pretty much every game in the series falls within that 5-7 hours of runtime, with the developers opting to tell a brief story. Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games all seem to realize that the main draw for their games is the Multiplayer and Zombie modes, so keeping the campaign short and sweet allows the devs to focus their attention on other modes while still honoring those who do enjoy a narrative-driven experience.
How long Call of Duty: Vanguard takes to beat will also be relative to each player depending on what difficulty they chose to tackle the missions. Those who chose Recruit or Regular difficulties will likely find themselves breezing through the story in a short amount of time while cranking up the difficulty to Hardened or Veteran should extend that playtime due to the higher intelligence/accuracy of Nazi soldiers and ability to die much quicker. Despite worries that the newest Call of Duty was being rushed, Call of Duty: Vanguard's short campaign maintains the quality of past games and is the perfect appetizer for the game's more robust Multiplayer and Zombie modes.