Call Of Duty: Vanguard Drops Brand-New Gameplay Trailer At Gamescom

Wew, what a trailer. During the Gamescom Opening Night, Treyarch proudly showed off the story behind one of the main characters of the campaign. As the developers explained, the story of Call of Duty: Vanguard will focus on the development of the very first special forces and their personal stories inspired by real historic events from World War II.

Doing so, the trailer follows Polina Petrova, a medic turned calm and collected elite sniper, explaining her origin story of having to escape the attack on her city by the German military. 

The trailer showed off fast-paced and highly tense gameplay in which the sense of emergency on the player is turned on to the max at all times. Escaping through a window, Polina traverses window sills to get to safety in another building as more German soldiers are gathering on the ground floor below her. The gorgeous graphics paint the picture of a Soviet city under attack and set aflame.

Polina doesn't take long to get busy, she sneaks up on a German soldier and takes care of him with her trusty knife. Exploring the house more, she encounters an opened window, from which she sees the horrific sight of an impending execution. Not second-guessing herself, she immediately starts opening fire with a sniper rifle as she starts shooting German soldiers shortly before they can execute the civilians. Once more she is chased and has to shoot her way out of the room. 

As she gets outside and on the ground floor, she has to sneak past a tank column that crosses the road without being seen. Crawling below steel beams that hold up as tanks roll over them, she makes it over. Silently killing more and more German soldiers as she makes her way through what looks like a bank, she unleashes havoc, throwing Molotov cocktails and the kitchen sink to cause as much chaos as possible. Eventually, her fight ends as she is knocked out by a German soldier catching her off guard.

Here, the trailer makes a time jump to an hour earlier, once again in Polina’s perspective, as she sneaks through an allied camp to get to her medic tent. We witness the start of the attack of the Russian camp as the city is levelled by bombs and our main protagonist has to once again jump to safety over the rooftops while German bombers fill the sky. As the building she is in collapses, she has to take a leap of faith to the next one.

The gameplay trailer showed off a wide variety of mechanics, from knife kills to shotguns to sniping, as well as sneak parts of the mission requiring you to pick your fights in a smart and collected way. Moreover, judging by the gameplay trailer, movement mechanics will play a big role, incorporating the usual run and gun but also the sneaky gameplay as well as the climbing of walls through interactions with stepping stones one might be used to from games like Assassin's Creed or Uncharted.

While the single player campaign rarely is the focus of each new Call of Duty title, with the multiplayer taking most of the attention, the developers appear to have kept it true to its formula, expanding gameplay mechanics to suit the high tempo and intensity gameplay we are used to from Call of Duty games.