Note: Call of Duty: Vanguard's zombies mode is covered in this review. See our reviews of the Call of Duty: Vanguard multiplayer and single-player campaigns for our opinions on the other two modes.

The Zombies mode in Call of Duty has revolved around the axis once more. For the first time since 2017's Call of Duty: WW2, we are slaying the rotting corpses of the Third Reich on gothic European battlefields as Vanguard returns to the bloody boundaries of World War II. Furthermore, Treyarch's most recent rendition of Call of Duty: World of War featured zombies, so for those who were in high school when the mode first appeared, it might have seemed like a homecoming and a living example of how the mode has changed over time. Sadly, this promise is wasted by a glaring dearth of material at launch, which makes Vanguard's zombies mode seem like an afterthought.

The fundamentals are in order. The horrific, fantastical alternate world into which you and your three companions have been thrust—red sky, cursed talismans, eldritch gods—is a far cry from the steely reality that is emphasized in Call of Duty mainline games as well as in Vanguard's campaign and multiplayer features. I've always appreciated how Treyarch unashamedly piles on the gore as waves of ravenous opponents keep pouring and you have to survive as long as you can in Call of Duty's horrific, Doom-esque environment.

A little melodrama can also be found in the periphery: the Nazis have deviated too far from their esoteric preoccupation and unleashed hideous perdition amid the rubble of Stalingrad. They will tell you everything about their transgressions in audio logs that are easily ignored, as they should. We are here, after all, to dispatch legions of zombies with the same sleek first-person shooting mechanics that have kept Call of Duty a fixture for almost twenty years, and that aspect still feels fantastic. We always paired our Van Helsing fantasies with the weightiness of 1940s firearm innovation; you take the front two windows, I'll take the back door, and we'll keep shooting Tommy guns until we run out of ammunition.

Our visions of Van Helsing were always paired with the weightiness of 1940s weapon tech.

This year, there will be a random component to every run. That touchstone immediately pops out, and a Treyarch developer informed me that roguelites like Hades were significant throughout creation. Between encounters, you'll spend a lot of time in Vanguard's Zombies lazing around a war-torn hub zone (similar to Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls or The Traveller in Destiny) where you can craft weapons, juice firearms, and swap in potent but generally uninteresting buffs called Covenants. These buffs might give you a health kickback after every melee kill or revive allies more quickly, among other things. These choices work well with Vanguard's four ultimate abilities, which fit into the standard DPS/Tank/Healer role: a destructive energy mine, an invisibility field, a party-wide damage bonus, and a speed-dampening vortex. setup for class balance, and give the action a few more deliberate flourishes. It's as satisfying as you might imagine booby-trapping a spawn place with a screen-filling bomb, and I'd be ashamed to say that hiding from certain death while wearing an invisibility cloak helped me maintain my good reputation among my friends.

Nevertheless, I found myself yearning for augmentations that offered a little more color than simply quickening my movements, as the majority of the Covenant increases available for purchase are very uninspired. This is partially due to the fact that they are nothing like the randomized bonuses you discover when exploring the maps. As an illustration, I discovered a power-up that essentially grants you the Golden Gun from GoldenEye: any zombie you tag, no matter where they are, instantly collapses. Of course, finding it is all up to chance, but it's so much more fun than all of the pricey items offered at your headquarters. It's uncommon to experience one of those "aha" moments centered over loot that numerous other roguelike games; the moment when every chance improvement comes together to create an incredible miracle run, akin to striking gold. Unfortunately, Vanguard's creativity ends with its undead popping out greater damage figures.

Vanguard's creativity ends with its undead shooting more damage out of their heads.

Zombies follow a strict formula: use one of the outlying portals to an instanced challenge (survive an onslaught, escort a floating skull, or power up obelisks), then min-max your build back at basecamp. All of those upgrade stations require currency you earn out in the killing fields. While there are lots of zombies to kill in those three types of missions, they also get old pretty soon. The onslaught, in particular, has you fighting off the hoard for nearly two minutes in incredibly cramped corridors—the kind of simple design you'd expect from the early days of World at War. The sudden left hook I had been waiting for forever arrived. There are no bosses, surprising cutscenes, or unusual challenges. As a matter of fact, the zombie community has already created a joke that highlights how frequently the prerecorded voice acting plays while you wait around Stalingrad for something to do.

The team has two options after completing four objectives: either they can advance, understanding that the challenge will increase with each success, or they can sneak out of the hotspot and return to safety to start over the following time. Treyarch wants you to bleed over your character sheet in order to survive that escalation; to scroll through the network of weapons, Covenants, and other accouterments to craft the ultimate zombie-killing machine. With these tools, there's definitely the opportunity for experimentation. During one of my runs, I combined a few upgrades to slow down my targets to a crawl. This worked well with my Covenant, which enhanced damage to corpses that were impeded. All in all, though, Vanguard's Zombies are really stupid. That's OK; not many people play zombies to show off their unmatched tactical skills, but Treyarch hasn't really made a strong case for insightful thinking in this regard. Ultimately, we're still using the left-click hold over all other options.

The architecture for eliminating undead is effective, but everything else in Zombies is oddly simple.

The mode is far too thin, and that's the fundamental problem with the most recent iteration of Zombies. Each group I joined repeatedly went through the same three constrained missions, trudging through a small number of upgrades without the building suspense of the more conventional horde-mode approach. Vanguard has a small, unimpressive perks suite, no amazing weaponry, and no Easter egg narratives. This place has a functional system for eliminating undead, but everything else in Zombies is oddly simple.

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The fact that roguelikes can still surprise you after several plays is one of their best features. Do you recall how amazing it was to learn of the covert battle against Charon in Hades? Or when you opened Enter The Gungeon and discovered an even more strange arsenal? The degree to which Treyarch's design lacks that same energy is rather startling. The same herd of zombies that we're killing are interspersed with some beefier, less intriguing enemies who fit neatly into predefined categories (a zombie brandishing a rifle! A zombie that bursts into flames when struck!), with zero movement at all. After my initial excursion into Stalingrad, I was never shocked at all, which is fairly damning for a game that's meant to be a fun, pulpy diversion like Call of Duty.

Naturally, Treyarch claims that a "main quest," which sounds a lot like the older, more narratively-driven Call of Duty Zombies, won't be released until December 2, which is almost a whole month beyond the original release date. In the interim, we will be combing through a number of disjointed battle venues, accumulating a lot of viscera and not much else. When a major component of one of the biggest games of the year can come transparently and blatantly incomplete, it begs the question of what a release date even means in this day and age.

The Decision

Zombies is converted into a run-based, roguelike-inspired cooperative shooter in Call of Duty: Vanguard. Harvesting materials, developing a hub world, and facing the existential fear that one blindside flank may wipe out all your progress are all there are. But Zombies feels incredibly hollow right now, with only three sorts of repetitious missions and no overarching main objective that doesn't arrive until December. Who knew the curse of undeath would be so uninteresting?