Video Game / Call of Duty: Vanguard

Rise on every front.

The one with Anachronism Stew aplenty.

Call of Duty: Vanguard is a 2021 first-person shooter video game developed by Sledgehammer Games ^note with assistance from Treyarch and published by Activision. It is the eighteenth mainline entry in the Call of Duty series. Like Sledgehammer's previous installment, Vanguard returns to a World War II setting, but with a bit of a twist.

While the backdrop is still that of typical WWII, the campaign largely focuses on events in the war's immediate aftermath (in Europe at least). After the Battle of Berlin, four soldiers from different Allied armies - Arthur Kingsley of Great Britain, Polina Petrova of the Soviet Union, Lucas Riggs of Australia and Wade Jackson of America - are inducted into a special forces program known as Task Force Vanguard. Their mission? To uncover the truth behind Project Phoenix, a contingency plan adopted by Nazi Germany to instate a successor to Hitler after his death, and ensure that this "successor" does not come to power. The campaign hops back and forth between this operation, and missions set during the war itself, fleshing out each operative's origins on different fronts of the conflict.

The multiplayer is largely akin to that of Modern Warfare (2019), carrying over that game's Gunsmith system and the more tactical mechanics of that game, though there is also a new gamemode included in the form of Champion Hill - which sees teams of two fighting their way through a tournament-style bracket, on a limited pool of lives that carry over between rounds.

Vanguard also incorporates its own take on the series' famed Zombies mode, serving as a prequel to the incarnation from Black Ops Cold War. Content from this title was also integrated into Warzone, along with a new map known as Caldera.

The game was released on November 5, 2021 for the Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Reveal Trailer, Stalingrad Gameplay, Multiplayer Reveal.

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Tropes on every front:

• Ace Pilot: Wade Jackson is this for the team. In the game, he flies a SBD-3 Dauntless, a D3A "Val", and a Junker Ju 52 to good effect.
• Adjustable Censorship: An option to toggle the display of swastikas can be found in the settings menu, likely done to make life easier for Let's Play streamers who might get flagged for (unintentionally) showing Nazi iconography during gameplay.
• A.K.A.-47: Similar to recent titles, Vanguard has to make do with unlicensed names even for familiar firearms. To name a few: The Luger P08 pistol is called the "Klauser", the Tokarev TT-33 is the "Ratt", the Webley Mk. VI revolver is the "Top-Break", the Fedorov Avtomat is now the "Automaton", and the Mauser C96 and Winchester M1897 are slapped with the generic "Machine Pistol" and "Combat Shotgun". Even the Thompson, named the M1928 in-game, is the wrong model (it's the period-accurate M1A1, though several attachments are available to make it superficially resemble the M1928). The Mosin-Nagant retains its "Three-Line Rifle" moniker from Call of Duty: WWII, a common nickname for it in Russia that's been practically unheard of in the West. The choice to rename many of these weapons was likely for artistic purposes, since most of the trademarks of WWII weapon names, if they even existed, would have expired by now.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • As with every WWII-set Call of Duty since World at War, the M1911A1 pistol is depicted with flush-fit 8 round magazines. These magazines did not exist until the 1970s when Wilson Combat started producing them to coincide with the Series 70 versions of 1911.
  • As seen in the Stalingrad level, the anachronistic StG44 is one of the weapons that can be picked up. Made even worse later in the campaign when the StG44 appears in the Pacific, a theater the Germans, much less their weapons, never made it to.
  • As with most games set prior to 1953 that feature the Browning Auto-5 self-loading shotgun, a post-1953 example is featured in-game and one of the two key features of the updated gun's two-piece shell lifter (the other being the ability to load shells into the tube without needing to hold the bolt-release button down) is shown: The ability to chamber-load the weapon when it's empty and the bolt locked open, without physically plopping the first shell into the chamber via the open eject port, simply by inserting the first shell into the empty tube, with the bolt automatically closing to chamber the just-loaded round when the lifter drops into the closed position.
  • The level Stalingrad takes place in 1942-1943 yet T-34/85s (armed with the 85 mm ZiS-S-53 cannon) can be seen, even though this version of the tank wouldn't appear until 1944.
  • Also during the Battle of Stalingrad, the Ju 87 bombers are of the G-1 variant as indicated by their 37 mm gun pods and lack of air brakes. This variant, however, wouldn't see service until April 1943, more than two months after the Battle of Stalingrad ended.
  • The mission "Numa Numa Trail", set in 1943 Bougainville, features M4A3E4 Sherman tanks, which was a variant that did not exist until after World War II.
  • In terms of whole military units, the 93rd Infantry Division saves Wade in Bougainville in 1943, but the 93rd did not go overseas until January 1944.
  • In Lucas' mission in North Africa, his team encounters a convoy in 1941 led by a German Panzer IV with a long barrel 7.5 cm KwK 40 cannon in Tobruk. Problem is that this type of Panzer IV with the long cannon did not see service nor production until early 1942.
  • At the beginning of the El Alamein mission, the combined British-Australian forces referred to the rockets the Germans used to take out their tanks as RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades). RPG as a popular term nowadays only started to gain its name via the adoption of the Soviet-made RPG-2 in 1954 and RPG-7 in 1961, whose official names happened to have the same initialism as "rocket-propelled grenade"; while anti-tank rocket launchers were definitely used during World War II, they were not referred to as RPGs at the time.
  • Several attachment options reflect tactical doctrine which didn't come into play until decades after the war, including attachments that wrap tape around parts of the grip or magazine for an easier grip (only common after 2000), mag attachments which change the reload animation to grab the new mag then replace the old one with it in one quick motion (first proposed in 1960), and the option of using a magnified optic together with an unmagnified sight on top of it or canted 45 degrees to the right (earliest documented instances were in the 1980s).
  • Pistols in the game are held in a modern two-handed grip, rather than in the teacup or one-handed "point shooting" stances that were actually practiced during World War II^note Such is especially egregious considering that they got that right in WWII, and it would've helped to further differentiate the Vanguard weapons from others in Warzone.
  • The "Rack It" finishing move for all operators features them holding the knife in a Harries technique stance in conjunction with the 1911. The Harries technique was developed in the early 1970s and for law enforcement use.
  • Snoop Dogg is a playable Operator, and was born in 1971, roughly 26 years after the end of WWII, though in his case, this was very much intentional.
  • By Season 4, it seems that Sledgehammer has just stopped caring about historical accuracy or even basic research into the time period; the weapons from the update are all from 1952 or later, while the "Marco 5" is a rechristened LF-57. A gun that wouldn't be fielded until 1962, almost two decades after the Second World War. Even the Vargo-S, which may or may not barely escape this^note The gun is based off of the MBC-2, an early prototype to the designed-in-1952-at-the-earliest VAHAN that got added to Cold War (which was also anachronistic at the rifle wasn't finalised until the 1990s), the 20-round .30-06 magazine appears to be a 20-round AK magazine.
  • And by Season 5, they gave up entirely. The Valois and RA-225 at least come from around the time period (former from the 1860s, the latter 1948), but the BP50 is an F2000 (which was created in 2001), and one of the other weapons is the EM1 from Advanced Warfare^note renamed the "EX-1" and dubbed a prototype, like that even matters at this point which is set in 2054, crossing the border from stupidly anachronistic to outright fictional.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: The game switches between the various different characters, which each one having different special abilities. Nowak is played in the prologue and has no special attributes, Kingsley can issue commands to nearby soldiers, Polina can parkour up certain walls and move quickly through tight spaces as well as bait out sniper fire with the glint from her knife, Wade has Bullet Time via his Focus ability, and Riggs can carry more grenades than normal as well as multiple different grenade types and can also see the throwing path of his grenades when aiming them.
• And the Adventure Continues: How the campaign ends. Vanguard has killed Freisinger and has escaped Berlin to safety in a captured German transport aircraft. However, the treasure trove of documents in the transport aircraft reveal the scope of Project Phoenix, encompassing different projects all across the world from Latin America to Antarctica, leading Vanguard to conclude their work isn't finished just yet.
• And This Is for...: Arthur says this to Richter about Richard Webb. The team also uses this for Novak when chasing Freisinger.
• Armor Is Useless: Averted, armor on a person or vehicle makes them more resistant to death or destruction.
  • The Heavily Armored Mook Jagermorders can take a beating before going down.
  • A German tank in Tobruk put its armor to use by resisting Lucas' explosive trap that was only expected to meet a more vulnerable truck.
  • One multiplayer field upgrade allows armor plates to be distributed among teammates, which reduces damage taken when enemies shoot you in the torso.
• The Artifact: To some degree, Gunsmith is this. Introduced in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), it made sense not only mechanically (since it's an evolution of previous forms of Create-a-Class) but also in-universe (since modern militaries do frequently allow and even standardize different attachments on a primary weapon for different mission profiles). It skirted by in Black Ops Cold War as well because the game centers around the special-ops types that would use heavily-customized guns even in The '80s, and moreover the attachments generally still fit the time period, the "universal" options looking more primitive than those in MW2019 and more specialized attachments for a specific gun usually made to fit that specific gun (e.g. the "C58" is a CETME, so almost all of its unique attachments are based on barrels, grips and stocks from other more obscure CETME variants or even the CETME's German cousin, the H&K G3). Vanguard, however, has almost no in-universe precedent for the system, since modifying guns for a different mission in the real WWII usually just took the form of replacing a standard rifle with one that had a scope fitted, and personal customizations rarely went any farther than carving a word into the stock or slipping a photograph under clear acrylic grips. The result is that very few of the attachment options fit this game's time period, because either the attachments themselves didn't exist in the 1940s (several stock options taken from post-war weapons, like those of an IMI Uzi or Romanian AIMR, or offering "red dot sights" by arbitrarily scaling down reflector sights that could be and were only mounted on aircraft at the time) or they reflect tactical doctrine that didn't exist at the time (tape wrapped around the grip for easier handling or mounting both a telescopic sight and one of those sized-down reflectors 45 degrees to the side as a close-range backup).
• Artistic License – History: See Anachronism Stew for a list of a lot of things that are out of their time.
  • In the first mission, Arthur Kingsley noted that the Phoenix documents are of special interest because they are stored away from the defensive might of the German military and in the middle of nowhere that is Hamburg in April 1945. However, in reality, Hamburg was very much a part of the front line, with battles raging between the German's 1st Parachute Army occupying the city and the British XII Corps around the same time frame as the Battle of Berlin itself (which is also depicted in the campaign's final mission, in May 1945). To say that Hamburg was an "arse end of nowhere" is not entirely accurate from the perspective of the German front.
  • Padmavati Balan's cinematic intro video has her battling German soldiers to rescue captured Allied soldiers in a tropical territory implied to be in the Indian-Southeast Asia region due to her bio stating she is in the Indian National Army (an Axis-aligned organization, which makes it odder for her fighting on the Allied side). Germany did not commit any sort of fighting force in the region of challenge British India, making their depiction in her bio rather odd (although it is implied that these Germans were part of Project Phoenix).
  • In "Lady Nightingale", set in January 1943, Steiner is shown to hold the rank of SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer. In reality, no Waffen-SS officer held that rank until 1944, when Hitler personally promoted Sepp Dietrich and Paul Hausser.^note  Two other SS men, Kurt Daluege and Franz Xaver Schwarz, were promoted to the rank in 1942, but neither of them ever served in combat. Dietrich's rank was made retroactive to 1942, but the fact remains that no officer of the Waffen-SS held the rank during the Battle of Stalingrad.
  • Freisinger and several of his co-conspirators in Project Phoenix are members of the SS, and apparently regard Hitler as a coward and failure. In reality, many high-ranking members of the SS remained fanatically loyal to Hitler and the Third Reich until the end and even beyond. All of the major anti-Hitler conspiracies during the war, such as the 20 July plot (a.k.a. Operation Valkyrie), were planned by members of the Heer, the regular German army. Indeed, Valkyrie specifically called for the SS in general to be dissolved and the Waffen-SS to be forcibly incorporated into the Wehrmacht, as they were loyal to Hitler before Germany and the army's generals (probably correctly) suspected that the SS would riot if they found out that the Heer had been responsible for Hitler's death.
  • In Lucas Riggs’ story, the Australian 9th division is led by a British major. The 9th division was NEVER commanded by anyone not from Australia. Heck, no Australian division was ever part of the British Army.
• Artistic License – Military:
  • Despite being head of the Gestapo, Freisinger is only an SS-Untersturmführer, equivalent to a second lieutenant. This is an absurdly low rank for a man in his position. For context, the man on whom he was based, Heinrich Müller, held the rank of Gruppenführer (equivalent to a two-star general).
  • Steiner is shown to be in command of the Germans at Stalingrad, but there were never any Waffen-SS units in the German order of battle there and thus no reason for an SS general officer to be present. The closest Waffen-SS unit to Stalingrad in 1943 was the II SS Panzer Corps, which was fighting at Kharkov several hundred miles to the west.
• Ascended Meme: If you kill yourself with a grenade, you get an achievement simply titled "F", a nod to the infamous "Press F to pay respects" meme spawned by Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, also developed by Sledgehammer Games. The same meme extends to the multiplayer, where you can put a "F" typewriter key cap as a charm on your weapon.
• Aura Vision: Wade's "Focus" skill in the campaign uses this when hiding and evading from the Japanese in Bougainville. The skill highlights the enemy to Wade, even if they are behind opaque covers.
  • Also, the effect of the "Piercing Vision" perk in multiplayer. If you hit an enemy through a wall, they stay visible for a couple of seconds.
• Bayonet Ya: Several enemies in the game will attempt to bayonet the player in the campaign. It is also an attachment for weapons.
• Big Damn Heroes: Wade experiences this in Bougainville. When Wade and his rear-gunner Mateo were captured by the Japanese, Wade sees an officer pull his gunto out of his sheath with the implication that they are about to be executed. The process was quickly interrupted under a hail of gunfire from a squad from the 93rd Infantry Division that shoots up the Japanese camp, then burns them out with a flamethrower.
• Blinded by the Light: How the Vanguard team gets captured. Trapped in a submarine with an incoming German force, a stun grenade is thrown in and blinds the team, including the player character Novak. The next scene opens with the team captured on top of the submarine.
• Blown Across the Room: Downplayed. In the campaign, killing an enemy with a sufficiently powerful weapon has them tumbling backwards dramatically rather than just falling down. This is most notable in Polina's Stalingrad missions once she uses the Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle.
• Bludgeoned to Death: The playable character in the first mission, Novak, was killed this way by Freisinger.
• Boom, Headshot!: Many characters meet their ends through this.
  • Thomas Jones, a fellow paratrooper with Arthur during D-Day, was killed this way attempting to open a door. Whatever did it blew his head clean off.
  • Richard Webb was dispatched this way by Richter.
  • Several Russian soldiers in the Stalingrad mission are killed with a clean shot through the head, a sign to Polina of the presence of snipers.
• Bullet Time: Wade's skill "Focus" in shooting segments becomes this, slowing down time to allow him to more easily pepper Nazi or Japanese soldiers with bullets. It also automatically locks your aim onto enemy heads.
• Call-Forward: During the Vanguard Team's search through Nazi documents in Reisinger's escape plane, Lucas uncovers a document he reads titled "Project Nova".
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Once Vanguard catches up to Reisinger in Berlin, Reisinger invokes this trope in a bit to save his life as he has the intel the Allies need to understand Project Phoenix, with Lucas Riggs agreeing that Reisinger is valuable as intel. Arthur and Polina decides to hell with that and burns him alive. Reisinger's defense is later made moot when Vanguard takes his escape plane and finds it loaded with Project Phoenix documents.
• Combat Medic: Polina was originally drafted as a nurse before the Nazis raided her hometown of Stalingrad. Aside from evading German airstrikes, she spends a good portion of the level shooting Nazis while still wearing a medic armband, only removing it at the end of the mission.
• Continuity Nod:
  • A member of the all-black 93rd Infantry Division named Lewis Howard mentions he has a brother serving in Europe. Considering his identical surname, face and voice, one can assume he is the twin brother of Corporal Marcus Howard from Call of Duty: WWII.
  • As Vanguard team root through Nazi documents involved with Project Phoenix, two document titles are mentioned: "Project Nova", a Nazi gas weapon that becomes the plot point of Call of Duty: Black Ops, and "Project Aether", the genesis of Call of Duty: Zombies mode for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Call of Duty: Vanguard.
• Cool Plane: A variety of cool planes are seen in the campaign, whether they're driven by Wade or dropping bombs onto the characters.
  • The D-Day mission has the British paratroopers jumping out of Douglas C-47.
  • The Stalingrad mission opens like the real event, with a large-scale German bombardment of the city. This shows with He 177s flying in formation high in the sky while Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers strafe the city.
  • The Pacific sequence of the campaign has the most planes shown in the campaign, with Wade’s own SBD Dauntless dive bomber, as well as the US Navy's F4F Wildcats and TBD-1 Devastators. The Japanese themselves show up with A6M Zeroes and a D3A "Val" dive bomber, the latter of which Wade captures and uses in Bougainville.
• Damsel in Distress: Polina becomes a POW with the rest of the Vanguard unit after their capture by Freisinger. Richter even attempts to invoke this during his interrogate by threatening to use her peril to make the other Vanguard members talk.
• Damsel out of Distress: Richter's attempt to hold Polina hostage falls flat against Polina's hardened combat experience, who mocks Richter for his rather piss-poor torture performance. Later, it's Polina who reveals her knife that kickstarts Vanguard's plan to escape.
• Dangerous Deserter: Roland's profile cutscene contains scenes of him going to town on the crew of a Wehrmacht truck... and later on a shot of his personnel file, complete with a photo of him in a German uniform.
• Decisive Battle:
  • The Battle of Midway, considered by historians as the turning point in the Pacific War, is part of Wade Jackson's missions. In this particular battle, he was responsible for singlehandedly taking out two Japanese aircraft carriers during a sortie.
  • As matter of fact, three of four major characters made their exploits in some of the most decisive battles of World War II, including the aforementioned Midway for Wade, Stalingrad for Polina and El Alamein for Lucas.
• Defector from Decadence:
  • Invoked when Lucas Riggs convinces Richter he can no longer tolerate being with Vanguard, using the animosity between British and Australians to bolster his credibility. This is later averted as this was a ploy by Vanguard to have Lucas catch Richter off guard for their escape plan.
  • The multiplayer operator Shigenori is this, defecting to the Allies after disagreeing with his IJA commander over the Japanese war crimes (which did culminate in him attacking said officer, being branded as a deserter, and sentenced to execution).
• Desert Warfare: The North Africa front, where soldiers and tanks must fight in the hot, sandy desert, is also where Riggs destroyed one of Rommel's bases.
• Divided We Fall: In the African missions, Lucas' faction is rife with dissention and internal animosity. Maj. Henry Hamms is a racist British officer who only cares about glory at the expense of others. Lucas Riggs is VERY open about his hatred for Hamms (his commanding officer) due to his crappy treatment of Australians.
• Elite Mooks: The Jagermorders, an elite unit of the Waffen-SS that serves as bodyguards for high-ranking Nazi officials. As such, they are most often seen near General Steiner when Polina attempts to hunt him down in Stalingrad, Reisinger when the Vanguard team pursues him through Berlin and Wolfram Von List when he raises the dead in the Zombies cinematic.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: The Vanguard team weaponizes this against Richter, feeding him details and letting him come to his own conclusions on Project Phoenix. This puts him in a state of confusion and paranoia to exploit once Vanguard made their move. Richter's observation of Reisinger disposing of officers not in Project Phoenix didn't help matters.
• Foreshadowing: This happens when the Gestapo captures Wade Jackson and tosses him into Vanguard's cell. When trying to explain what he did in his disappearance before the team's capture, he makes an offhand mention about borrowing a Russian bomb that was rigged to go in an hour, though the dialogue afterward paints this as another tall tale from Wade. It wasn't, and the Russian bomb goes off in time that allows Vanguard to waltz right out of there in their escape.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon:
  • The M2 Flamethrower weapon, which Wade uses for a brief period during the Bougainville mission.
  • The Germans also utilized flamethrowers against the Vanguard team, but Polina dispatches them through Flamethrower Backfire.
• Flamethrower Backfire: Utilized by Polina during the "Fourth Reich" mission, where she flanks around a German unit pinning down the Vanguard team and shoots down the flamethrowers by targeting their fuel tanks. The last flamethrower is explicitly dispatched this way by Polina through a small cutscene as the POV switches to Lucas.
• Flare Gun: The common signaling tool used by the Vanguard members.
• Fourth Reich: Freisinger's ultimate plan using Project Phoenix, using an underground group of Nazi officers to continue the Nazi Reich around the world after the demise of Hitler's Third Reich. The trope term is even name-dropped.
• Friend or Foe?:
  • Arthur and his fellow paratroopers at D-Day faced this situation in "Operation Tonga" when they take the German Merville artillery battery, but their success signal flare to the navy fail, and so the navy began shelling on what they still believe are German positions. The navy would stop their bombardment when Arthur fires a working flare into the air.
  • Strangely averted in the campaign's ending cinematic, despite escaping on a clearly marked Nazi transport aircraft and no effort was seen to contact the Soviets to avoid friendly fire, Vanguard was able to take off from within Berlin without any issues despite Berlin being surrounded by the Soviets and any anti-air assets they may have.
• Genre Shift: The last Call of Duty game set in World War 2, Call of Duty: WWII, had a much more grounded and historically authentic story, tone, and setting, as a callback to the original Call of Duty games pre-Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and in stark contrast to the more fantastical, action-movie inspired post-Modern Warfare games in the series. Vanguard is a complete 180 turn from this, being pulpy and over-the-top with plenty of Rule of Cool taking precedent over historical accuracy, and is not too far removed from the Wolfenstein series.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way: The Sten Mk 2 does not have the bolt slide out of the back and over the users hand; not only would this make holding the gun impossible (without snapping off the users thumb) but attempting to aim down such a device would be a death sentence, since you're effectively putting a cattle stunner up against your eye.
  • Not only does the game Hand Wave this clear design issue by having the bolt no-clip through Arthur Kinglsey's hand but he's also seen with his other hand over the ejector port which would in reality jam the gun; or at least it would if the gun was actually ejecting bullets but the magazine is clearly empty.... but he's still firing the gun?
• Heavily Armored Mook:
  • The Jagermorders are heavily armored and can take quite a lot of punishment before going down. They're actually only about half as durable as Modern Warfare's Juggernauts, going down after a few dozen rounds of assault rifle fire as opposed to several dozen bullets, but are much faster and more intelligent, using smoke grenades to stun you and reposition after being shot several times, launching surprise attacks from flanking positions, and utilizing sniper rifles at long range.
  • Downplayed with the flamethrower troopers in the final level; they wear big bulky armor but only have about double the durability of a regular soldier and are encountered in a sniper section where it's quite easy to go for headshots anyway.
• Heroic Mime: Novak, the first playable character, is this. Novak is the only character that utilizes this as after he is killed, every other playable Vanguard members have prominent speaking roles.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Polina's brother Misha pulls this off once he gets mortally wounded by a sniper and pinned in the rubble when attempting to escape. He holds off the Germans and forces Polina to flee, when he pulls and drop two grenades.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: A trait of Project Phoenix that got Arthur's attention, observing the Nazis scramble to secure confidential documents, but in a place like Hamburg without the full might of German military as security. This leads him to believe that Nazis are keeping Phoenix a secret from even other Nazis.
• Hollywood Tactics: The trailer for Season 2 contains particularly egregious examples: Butcher stealthily attacks a Nazi guard with a knife, just to shoot him with an unsuppressed pistol two seconds later, the squad blindly fires through a door to the room where their objective they're meant to secure is located and throw grenades in that said room despite massive gas tanks placed there.
• How We Got Here: The chapters about Kingsley, Petrova, Jackson, and Riggs serve as these, describing how their heroics earned them their places in the Vanguard.
  • The Stalingrad demo trailer is also this, mainly consisting of Polina traversing the wreckage of Stalingrad's residences and streets, as well as a flashback where Polina sees Stalingrad in a much better shape until the Germans devastate the city with an air raid.
• Ink-Suit Actor: The likenesses of all the main playable characters are based on their performers.
• Ironic Echo: Used during Richter's interrogation of Lucas Riggs.
  Richter: One thing I learned, studying Allied strategy... Redundancy. Always have a Plan B.
  *Later*
  Lucas: (After killing the sole guard, knocking down Richter, and unlocking his cuffs) Redundancy, mate. Always have a Plan B.
• It's Raining Men: Arthur Kingsley and Richard Webb were originally from the British 6th Airborne Division. Kingsley's flashback mission, in fact, shows his and Webb's chaotic drop into Normandy on D-Day, where they took out a German gun battery at Merville.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Richter attempts to use this on the captured Vanguard team in an attempt to get them to talk of any other Allied SOE operations. Given the class of people he is trying this on, this doesn't work.
  Polina: You're not very good at this, are you?
• Jungle Warfare: The Pacific Theater is among the theaters covered, with US Soldiers shown fighting Imperial Japanese forces on a remote Pacific island full of vegetation.
• Just Plane Wrong: In the Stalingrad 1942 mission, two instances of erroneous planes are seen during the opening bombing campaign on Stalingrad.
  • The main level-bomber shown being used by the Germans is the He 177 Greif. While this plane was around and completed its first flight in 1939, these were not used as actively as depicted, only seeing more use there towards the end of 1942 to supply the German military and other bombing activities that totaled 13 missions. A more appropriate bomber used in larger numbers would have been the He 111 or the Ju 88.
  • As mentioned in Anachronism Stew, the Ju 87 shown strafing the ground are the G-1 variants, which would not see us until 1943.
    • For the Ju 87 in cinematic appearances, the Youtube Channel Military Aviation History did a short video compiling a list of issues with how a Ju 87 is modeled.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Richter finds himself like this in Reisinger's circle, after finding out about Reisinger's plan for a Fourth Reich after Hitler's death.
• Katanas Are Just Better: An Imperial Japanese officer in Bougainville pulls out his katana (well, actually a gunto), seemingly to execute Wade and Mateo after their capture, until the 93rd Infantry Division swoops in and saves them.
  • Multiplayer operator Shigenori Ota, in his cinematic bio introduction, fights his old IJA commander in a katana battle while the neighboring Australian and Japanese soldiers shoot it out with their rifles and submachine guns. Shigenori also uses the katana in multiplayer matches in finishing moves.
• Kill It with Fire: How Freisinger meets his end. Polina stabs open a fuel barrel that soaks Freisinger, and both she and Arthur toss a lit cigarette and lighter (respectively) onto him.
  • Several Germans in Polina's campaign burn when she uses a Molotov cocktail on them.
  • Wade gets to do this to a few Japanese soldiers once he takes control of the flamethrower during an assault.
• Kubrick Stare: The one Roland gives in multiplayer reveal materials is supremely creepy.
• Le Parkour: Polina's unique skill in her campaign arc, she uses this to maneuver around building and rubble to get into advantageous locations to snipe from.
• Mistaken for Racist: Lucas Riggs is assumed this during his fake defection towards the Nazis. Richter thinks that Lucas is defecting because he can't stand being under a black man. Lucas makes it clear that it's not that, but because of the bad relationship between British and Australians.
• Molotov Cocktail: In Stalingrad, Polina's brother Misha demonstrates to the family how to concoct one of these incendiary devices. Polina would use them to good effect when the Germans begin invading the city.
• Multinational Team: Task Force Vanguard itself, which at the start of the game consisted of two Brits (Kingsley and Webb), an American (Wade), an Australian (Lucas), a Russian (Polina), and a Yugoslavian (Novak).
• Nazi Gold: Freisinger's escape plane has a chest filled with Nazi gold inside that Vanguard captures alongside all of the stored documents. It's implied that Vanguard plans to use it to finance their continuing battle against the Nazi members of Project Phoenix.
• Necessary Drawback: Unlike previous titles in the series, Fast Mags in this game does not simply reduce reload time with no drawback other than taking up an attachment slot. Equipping Fast Mags to any weapon now comes with the drawback of having to use smaller, lower-capacity-than-standard magazines.
• The Neidermeyer: Lucas Riggs' CO Major Hamms, Upper-Class Twit Glory Hound Politically Incorrect Hero who belittles Riggs and his Awesome Aussie mates to hog all the glory for himself and his fellow Brits. Riggs would finally have enough of him when he tries to replace the Australian flag with the British one which dishonors the deaths of his friends who all died for a cause, prompting him to hand him a knuckle sandwich and leading him to be arrested the second time.
• Never My Fault: In the Tobruk 1941 campaign mission, Major Hamms, who insists he triggers the explosive trap that Lucas and his team set up, panics and blows it up too early before it could damage the lead tank of the convoy. He quickly faults Lucas (or Des if Lucas doesn't interact with the detonator in time) for his mishap.
  Major Henry Hamms: You distracted me!
• Noodle Incident: It's not exactly clear how Wade manages to borrow a bomb from the Russians. But he did, and its explosion outside the prison creates a distraction for Lucas to incapacitate Richter and begin Vanguard's escape plan.
• No Swastikas:
  • In the reveal trailer, the Iron Cross adorns the Germans' uniforms instead of swastikas. Zigzagged in the Story Trailer, where both Swastikas and Iron Crosses can be seen.
  • Swastikas can actually be toggled on and off in the game.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Although Vanguard captures the Nazi commander, Reisinger, alive and rather than keep him that way as a source of intel, Arthur and Polina decides to just kill him instead for everything he's done to the team.
• Pre-emptive Declaration: An internal one by Arthur as he's interrogated by Richter. He decides where he would sink his knife into Richter once they're through.
  Arthur: (Internally, referring to Richter) At that moment, I know what I had to do. Right of the suprasternal notch, below the clavicle. Once we had what we needed from this racist bastard... that's where I would put my knife.
  *Later*
  Arthur: (Outloud to Richter) Shhh. You've already done your part. (Begins sinking his knife into Richter) Right of the suprasternal notch, below the clavicle.
• Plot-Powered Stamina: Wade Jackson not only suffers through a plane crash at Bougainville, but also stabbed in the abdomen with a metal part during the crash. His rear gunner Mateo performs only basic first-aid on Wade, and yet Wade is able to perform throughout the mission (sneaking around Japanese patrol, assaulting a hill holding a flamethrower, then commandeer a Japanese dive bomber) with no indication that the wound was debilitating.
• Pretty Little Headshots: Zig-zagged, some headshots in the game are very bloody and graphic to the point of heads exploding. However, in the Stalingrad sniping mission, some Russian corpses downed by snipers are inspected to find a clean hole through the head with blood trailing down.
• Politically Correct History: The game was criticized by many journalistic outlets including Kotaku, Polygon, and Rolling Stone, who felt the game's effort to make the main cast more diverse was admirable, but thought it was done in a way that ignored and glossed over the real historical injustices and racism and sexism of the western allied nations.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: These are Nazis we're talking about here.
  • Freisinger's very first scene is evaluating the captured Vanguard team by their race and ethnicity, which piques his curiosity when he finds out that Arthur, a black man, is leading the team.
  • Richter interrogates the Vanguard team with this as well, referencing a eugenicist's work when interrogating Arthur, and threatening to invoke Damsel in Distress on Polina by making her scream to convince the other Vanguard members to talk. Despite this, he seems to be unaware of the animosity that Australians may have to serve under the British when interrogating Lucas Riggs, thinking he is defecting due to being unwilling to work under a black man.
  • Major Hamms of the British Army in Lucas' campaign in North Africa is also this, constantly deriding the Australians under his command. When the Australians are victorious after the Second Battle of El Alamein and attempt to raise an Australian flag, Hamms order it down and replaced it with a British flag. It gets him a fist to the jaw from Lucas.
• Russian Guy Suffers Most: Or girl, in this case. Compared to the rest of Vanguard, Polina has the most bleak backstory with her hometown invaded by the Nazis and her family killed by them.
• Serkis Folk: Outside of providing their likeness, the entire voice cast provided motion-capture performances for the cutscenes.
• Shout-Out: When escaping in the finale both Polina and Lucas reference other Projekts, Nova and Aether. After that Arthur journeys to the Cockpit to discuss another big Nazi Project “Aggregate” about V-2 Guided Rockets. Another popular franchise, Sniper Elite V2, that was about said Operation and the destruction of said rocket.
  • Arthur's Normandy mission bears a few similarities to Overlord, given both involve a black soldier (though British in this case, rather than American) taking command of a covert mission to disable Nazi coastal defences ahead of the D-Day landings.
• Shown Their Work:
  • The US Navy aircraft shown in Wade Jackson's missions each have the proper paint and US roundel schemes for both mid-1942 and late 1943.
• The Smurfette Principle: Of the five playable characters (revealed on the official website and also appearing in the reveal trailer), one of them (Lt. Polina Petrova) is a woman.
  • Averted in the multiplayer, where the split is even: six men and six women.
• Sniper Scope Glint: In "Lady Nightingale", the German snipers' positions are given away by a very noticeable white glint coming from their scopes, which allows Polina to take them out one by one.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Lucas specializes in this, being a demolition expert. This translates to gameplay by allowing him carry more grenades than the other characters, and also can accurately aim his grenades into targets.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: After the multiplayer reveal dropped, players were quick to point out that Shigenori and Wade resemble Takeo and Tank Dempsey from Call of Duty: Zombies.
• Swiss-Cheese Security:
  • Vanguard's prison situation after they were captured is relatively lax considering that they are captured SOE special forces operators. Throughout their interrogation, they are all placed within the same cell with no restrictions on communication among each other, allowing them to plan their cover stories and escape plan together. Once their escape plan is sprung (which involves an explosion!), they are only seen killing a single German guard and Richter and otherwise escaped their prison unopposed to hunt down Reisinger.
  • Downplayed in the final mission because Berlin was under siege by the Soviets and any immediate airport security detail covering Reisinger's escape were slaughtered by Vanguard, but Reisinger's escape plane filled with confidential documents about Project Phoenix has zero security detail in or around it.
• Switching P.O.V.: The final mission "Fourth Reich" utilizes this. After playing through all of Vanguard's member backstories throughout the campaign, "Fourth Reich" at certain points switches between Arthur Kingsley, Polina Petrova, Lucas Riggs, and Wade Jackson through the game, before ending on Arthur Kingsley's POV.
• Tagline: In the reveal trailer, the tag line "rise on every front" is revealed word-by-word after the Pacific Front is introduced.
• Tall Tale: Wade Jackson has a tendency of telling stories like this, with Arthur mentioning that the story details never stayed the same with each retelling. The mission reports, however, show that Wade's stories have an element of truth within them despite how outlandish they could become.
• Tanks, but No Tanks:
  • The T-34/85s appear in the campaign missions set in Stalingrad between 1942 and 1943. However, at that time the Soviet Army still used the T-34/76 models with a 76mm gun. The T-34/85 with an 85mm gun would not see production until early 1944.
  • The M4 Sherman tanks that appeared in the mission "Numa Numa Trail" set in the Battle of Bougainville in 1943 are post-war variants of the tanks, the M4A3E4. This variant saw the 76mm M1, a gun that did not see widespread use in the US military until July 1944 in the ETO, being used in the D78461 turret, intended to hold the 75mm M3 gun. The actual 76 mm Shermans the US military would use in the ETO had the larger T23's D82081 turret. To twist this discrepancies even further, the M4A3E4 would have used 1944 production variants of the M4A3 Sherman tanks.
  • The Panzer IV with a long-barrel 7.5 cm KwK 40 cannon are depicted as present in 1941 at Tobruk, but only saw production in early 1942.
• Tank Goodness: Although there isn’t a mission where the player drives a tank, a number of armored vehicles appear in the campaign and on multiplayer maps - specifically the M4 Sherman, Panzer IV, T-34/85, Crusader Mk II, and Type 95 Ha-Go.
• Those Wacky Nazis: It's World War II and Vanguard is putting a stop to Nazis who want to create the Fourth Reich.
• Torture Technician: Richter tries to be this on the captured Vanguard members to make them talk.
• Tragic Keepsake: Polina carries two from her dead family. Her Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle was from her father, and her knife was from her brother.
• Unique Enemy:
  • You only fight 6 Jaegermorders in the campaign; 3 in Lady Nightingale and 3 in The Fourth Reich, and they're treated more like Mini-Boss battles.
  • The 4 flamethrower troopers in Polina's section of the final level are the only time in the campaign said enemies ever appear.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Vanguard's plan to escape imprisonment from the Gestapo is not detailed after Polina reveals she still has her knife. It works when Lucas Riggs, taking her knife, stabs a Nazi guard and knocks out Richter after Wade's bomb blows up.
• Urban Warfare: Polina's mission in Stalingrad is this in spades, fighting in crumbling buildings and trenches where enemies can appear in any corner and elevation.
• Weapon Specialization: Each of the playable Vanguard team members have a distinctive weapon they use:
  • Arthur Kinglsey, a British paratrooper and commando, uses a British STEN submachine gun.
  • Polina Petrova, a Soviet sniper, has a Russian Mosin-Nagant with a scope.
  • Lucas Riggs, an Australian demolition expert, uses an Australian Owen submachine gun.
  • Wade Jackson, an American Ace Pilot, uses the rather out-of-place Japanese Type 100 submachine gun.
  • In multiplayer, each operator also have their own weapon of choice that grants more experience points.
• You Are in Command Now: Kingsley is forced to take command of what's left of his own company after his commanding officer, Captain Henry Baker, is killed not long after parachuting into Normandy.

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