Much like death and taxes, it seems we have to deal with an annual Call of Duty game shoved onto the shelves around the holiday season. This year’s Call of Duty is shaping up to be no different from the rest. It feels like a rare event when we are graced with a CoD game that stands out.

The recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare seems to be one of these golden releases, having higher ratings than Call of Duty: Cold War. With the beta for the upcoming Call of Duty: Vanguard coming to a close, we have a good idea of what we will be receiving alongside our Thanksgiving meals this November. Sadly, it doesn’t look like a great experience.

I was not a fan of Cold War when it came out and after spending a weekend with the beta for Vanguard, I am seeing some concerning similarities. While the developers are different for both games, it seems as though the same engine was used.

A big issue that I ran into when playing the beta was time to kill differences. It seems to take a decent amount of shots to kill from most of the guns we had access to in the beta. In fact, I even needed two bursts from the four-shot burst assault rifle to bring someone down. However, while I was playing I would find myself dying in what felt like one or two shots, only to watch the killcam and see the person hitting around 10 or so shots on me.

This inconsistency may arise from extreme de-sync on the server-side, allowing someone to hit half of the shots needed to kill me before I would even be shown one shot dealing damage. This is further supported by dying around corners frequently in the beta. Of course, it could also be explained by the guns having a high fire rate and having multiple shots hit, but it seems like only one shot on the receiving end due to the rapid hits.

Regardless of the cause of this issue, the fact remains that combat in Vanguard feels odd at best. During my time in the beta, I heard a decent number of players voicing their dislike of the game through voice chat. Of course, it is important to note that this was a beta of the game and Sledgehammer Games still has over a month to change things. However, Cold War also suffered from similar problems in the beta and tragically saw virtually no changes upon release. Personally, I will wait another year and see if the next release is any better.

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