YMMV / Call of Duty: Vanguard

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • The StG44 assault rifle can be customized in Gunsmith to have an under-folding stock, or no stock at all. This understandably caused complaints from some of the more gun-savvy Call of Duty players as the rifle's recoil buffer tube is located in the stock itself, thus using a folding stock or no stock at all will cause the weapon to not cycle after firing. However, Sturmgewehrs with folding stocks actually exist, well, kind of. The stock in the game was modelled after the Sport-Systeme Dittrich BD-44 Folding Stock◊, which itself was based on a stock designed for tank crew-use. That being said, it probably wouldn't be a drop-in modification considering the recoil buffer tube would need to be changed out as well.
  • The Panzerfaust, while normally a disposable anti-tank recoilless weapon, is depicted as reloadable. This is a feature of the Panzerfaust 150, with a reinforced firing tube that can withstand roughly 10 launches. Even on the more commonly-seen 60 variant, the warhead could be removed and reinserted as needed (e.g. when the weapon is placed into or taken out of storage). Furthermore, there is anecdotal evidence of Wehrmacht troopers picking up discarded launch tubes to send back to the rear lines to be fitted with new warheads, fuses and booster charges.
  • To the average player, the MK11 Launcher may seem like an entirely fictional weapon, but it is actually the very real Bomb Thrower, 2 inch, Mk I, though the real thing was used very differently.^note It was meant to be mounted on tanks and exclusively fire smoke shells, whereas the one in-game functions more like your average man-portable Grenade Launcher.
  • There are even some people out there that think the Goliath is something made up for the game.
  • Even the thermal sights on some guns, which seem particularly egregious to add, are based on actual experimentation with infrared scopes throughout WWII, although the actual infrared sights were usually massive in comparison to the ones in the game and very unwieldy as a result.
  • Some of the red dot designs in-game also technically existed at the time; the problem being that they couldn't be made small enough to mount on small arms, being much larger designs that were meant to be used for aiming aircraft-mounted weapons.
• Awesome Music: Bear McCreary brought his A-game to this one, and the score has been considered one of the franchise's best even by those who were disappointed by the game. Standouts include the tense and pounding "Operation Tonga", the frantic Orchestral Bombing of the fittingly-titled "Bombing Run", and the creeping, suspenseful "A Hunt in Stalingrad" underscoring Polina's deadly game of cat-and-mouse with Steiner.
• Complete Monster:
  • Main campaign: Leo Steiner is the officer leading the German invasion of Stalingrad and is characterized by his obsession with subjugating the city and its people. For over a year, Steiner conducts terror bombings and regular mass executions against civilian targets, hanging the bodies of his victims to break Stalingrad's morale. When hunted down by Polina Petrova, Steiner cruelly mocks the deaths of her family during the invasion and promises that Hermann Freisinger will complete his mission to destroy the Soviet Union.
  • Zombies: Kortifex the Deathless is a cruel entity originating from the Dark Aether, who wants to become the Construct's Archon and enslave the free wills of every being. Assassinating anyone who wanted to become the Archon, Kortifex also murdered his own parents, yet erased the memories of his bride and enslaved her as a Sister of Agony because she bore a child who could depose him. His ambitions later fueled his attempt to conquer the Dark Aether and he conducted a litany of atrocities, including the systematic execution of his men for failure and the genocide of an entire clan in the Wilds. Though defeated and imprisoned in his artifact, Kortifex would reemerge as Wolfram Von List's benefactor, raising an army of zombies under the promise that he would create a Thousand Year Reich and cleanse the world of anyone the Nazis deemed impure. Casually throwing away the lives of Die Warheit, Kortifex manipulates the Special Forces into freeing him and becomes the Archon, boasting that he will "thank" everyone by wiping out the universe, including Von List.
• Demonic Spiders: In the Campaign, attack dogs and soldiers charging at you with bayonets. While the method of defeating them is simple - just shoot them before they get into point blank range - that doesn't change the fact that if you fail to bring them down in time, you will be instantly killed, no questions asked. At least the guard dogs in Modern Warfare and the banzai chargers in World at War were merciful enough to give you a small chance to kill them if they got too close. Here? They get close, you are dead. End of story.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Boris Petrov, Polina's father, was played by Elya Baskin, making him the fourth actor from Air Force One to appear in a Call of Duty game after Glenn Morshower (Overlord in the first two Modern Warfare games and General Shepherd in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II), Gary Oldman (Viktor Reznov in Call of Duty: World at War and Call of Duty: Black Ops) and Andrew Divoff (Lev Kravchenko in Black Ops, Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War). Baskin had previously played terrorist Ace Pilot Andrei Kolchak in the film (and is probably best known as Peter's landlord from Sam Raimi's Spider-Man Trilogy).
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Some players were less than pleased to see another Call of Duty game set during World War 2 setting especially since Sledgehammer's previous game already covered the era. Likewise, the Gunsmith system is criticized for being nearly identical to the same systems in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War right down to even the camera angles when previewing attachments, which diminishes any sense of historical realism since these guns also appear in the singleplayer mode.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: In the Africa missions, the enemy Germans don’t have much characterization, but British major Henry Hamms receives more hate than they do, as he is an absolute douche who treats Australians like crap because he can, and his incompetence causes massive casualties. To top it off, his worst crime is dishonoring Riggs’ fallen fellow soldiers by tearing off the Australian flag and replacing it with a British one.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Do you speak Japanese? ^Explanation When Mateo and Wade are captured by the Japanese, a soldier with a heavy accent asks if they speak the language. The quote is used to poke fun at the rather narmy dialogue in Vanguard compared to the earlier title World at War. In the Japanese dub, the soldier instead says in Japanese, "do you feel like wanting to talk?"
  • Cursed Guns ^Explanation  The game's Gunsmith system borrowed from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) has been used almost incessantly by various fans and detractors of the game to create all sorts of cursed guns that look tacky, anachronistic and "tacticool". Forgoing the need to create practical firearms, just picking the most horrible attachment combinations and paintjobs on all the guns just to fully show how dumb and unrealistic the Gunsmith system is in Vanguard.
  • My Team VS Enemy Team ^Explanation  Used to mock the Political Overcorrectness in the game, due to multiplayer lacking specified factions like the British, Americans, or the Axis Powers despite being a World War II game.
  • No iconic characters in CoD^Explanation During an interview prior to the game’s release, one of the writers for the game stated that one of their desires was to make "flagship characters" for the franchise, as they thought there were currently none, or at least none that were on par with other mascot video game characters such as the Master Chief from Halo. This prompted confusion and ridicule from fans, with a common response to this statement being to point out some of the series' more notable characters, such as Captain Price, Simon "Ghost" Riley, and Soap MacTavish from the Modern Warfare trilogy, Viktor Reznov and Dimitri Petrenko from World at War, or Alex Mason and Frank Woods from Black Ops (keep in mind that Woods even won "The Best Video Game Character of the Year" at the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards). This take became even more ridiculous after Season 5, of which the main selling point is... bringing back iconic CoD antagonists.
  • Vangoated ^Explanation A nickname applied to ironically play the game up as bigger than it is, in a manner similar to Morbius (2022). Now an Ascended Meme, as Modern Warfare III's PlayStation exclusive operator Lockpick's default skin is labelled "Van Goated".
• Narm:
  • The anachronistic appearance of "tacticool" attachments on antiquated weapons in a realistic historical setting garnered many complaints from anyone with even the slightest knowledge of World War II-era firearms. Some glaring examples include a BAR assault rifle with a Cold War-era, Kalashnikov-style wire stock; an StG-44 rifle without a buttstock, which would cause the gun to fire but not cycle in real life given the lack of room for the recoil spring; modern-style retention reloads (i.e. swapping the current and new magazine with one hand) in a time period where the idea never existed, especially with magazines it is simply not practical with like the large and bulky drums of the Thompson; and the M1 Garand able to take drum magazines which never existed for it, and which, until one of the last updates the game received, still somehow produced the iconic ping when emptied. Needless to say, this became one of the biggest complaints thus far regarding this game.
    • Similar to this is a character example. One operator, Thomas Bolt, is described to have fought in both World Wars and is eager to return to his partner when he's able to. Overall, it's kind of heartwarming... but this gets completely destroyed when you remember that World War I went from 1914 to 1918, but thanks to a typo in one promotional image he is said to have been born in 1920. This means he somehow managed to participate in a war before he was even conceived. Given how the game is fairly serious with no supernatural elements, this turns an otherwise decent backstory into laughter fodder.
  • The "Numa Numa" map name makes everyone think of O-Zone's "Dragostea Din Tei".
  • In the Season 2 trailer, one of the dead guards has a wrench stuffed in his mouth, and one of the Task Force Yeti members removes it. No reason for either is shown, and the entire thing just looks silly.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Weapon bloom is hated by many players as it's an RNG mechanic that causes aimed shots to fly off on non-straight trajectories. On top of the bloom, the game also has a recoil-based spread, making automatic fire frustrating and mandating the use of accuracy-compensating attachments.
  • The challenges to unlock skins are also a complete pain since they are the same for all weapons. The most egregious one would be the "100 point-blank kills for sniper rifles" since sniper rifles are meant for long-range combat and only a skilled quick scoper would be able to stomach such a task.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: On Regular and even Hardened, the campaign is quite a bit easier than previous games in the series; enemies aren't as accurate as in most other Call of Duty games and being shot doesn't throw your aim off as much as in the Infinity Ward games, so you're not getting constantly aim-punched the second you poke your head out of cover. You can also survive more damage, to the point that on Regular difficulty you can even survive a grenade explosion as long as you're not actually holding it. About the only points of difficulty are a few moments where the game isn't clear what it expects you to do, such as sneaking past the first German with a flashlight on Operation Tonga, or sections where it completely changes the gameplay like The Battle of Midway. Veteran difficulty is still as hard as ever, though.
• Shocking Moments: Now, the game by Season 5 has been no stranger to historical inaccuracies and just blatantly inserting things completely out of place for the setting (such as Snoop Dogg casually helping out in World War II) but did anybody really expect Raul Menendez, Gabriel Rorke, Khaled Al-Asad, and Seraph to make their grand reappearances here of all places? Or the fucking EM1?!
• That One Achievement:
  • "Behind You". You must defeat ALL enemies in the department store section of Lady Nightingale using only takedowns. This is fine enough for the first couple of floors on unaware enemies, though it will take quite a while since there are a lot of them. The real challenge, though, is towards the end, the enemies will automatically become aggroed and always be aware of your position, forcing you to try using takedowns while they're shooting at you, which is largely hit-or-miss (it's possible to exploit a quirk in the AI programming by using the knife flash a few feet in front of them, which reliably sets the regular soldiers up for a takedown). Oh, and damaging an enemy using ANY other attack (shooting them, melee attacks, and grenades, including the fact that enemy grenades can damage other enemies) will automatically invalidate it, forcing you to either reload a checkpoint, or, if an inconvenient checkpoint saves, restart the ENTIRE level. According to the PlayStation Network, only about 0.1% of all players have the trophy.
  • "Duck and Dive" isn't much better, with 0.2% of all players having gotten it. In the Midway level, you have to complete the first dive-bombing run without getting hit by bullets. Thing is, if you push the controls too far, you'll get hit by flak bursts (which thankfully don't invalidate the trophy, but might push you into the bullets flying up). The trick is to not push the control stick (or move the mouse) too far when trying to dodge the bullets, or else you'll stray out of line and get hit by the flak bursts, but the game never tells you this. The slippery plane controls also make moving the plane around a challenge.
• That One Level: "The Battle of Midway" is considered one of the toughest levels in the game. For this one level, the game essentially becomes a flight simulator, but the plane controls (on PC at least) are poorly-implemented, as they are both over-sensitive and shaky.

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