Sledgehammer Games' blockbusting new Call of Duty game is finally here and the Campaign is easily one of the best we've played in a long time. The cinematics are fantastic and the characters are all brilliant - however, what actually happens?
We're not going to spoil things, but here's how many missions there are - a full list of all the Campaign missions available - and how long it takes to beat the game. Of course, there are factors that play into the duration of this campaign but we should be able to offer a rough estimate.
UPDATE - Is Vanguard's Campaign too short?
As you can see below, Call of Duty Vanguard only offers up nine missions in its Campaign. This is a couple less than other Call of Duty Campaigns and - when you consider each mission's length - it makes this Campaign a lot shorter than most.
You play through a series of flashbacks, filtered into the main narrative being played out which has SOTF 1 going after Project Phoenix. It's a fantastic way of doing things, but you feel like the Campaign itself ends just as things are getting started.
We won't go into details, but it sets everything up well for Sledgehammer Games to continue the story post-launch. The Campaign itself, though, is short and you should be able to finish it in 6-8 hours, depending on the difficulty. It's sort of like an interactive war movie - really. A good one, at that.
The only issue is... You're left wanting a lot more. Could we see post-launch narrative content drop? That would be a series first, but not impossible.
Full Vanguard Mission List
There are nine total missions in Call of Duty: Vanguard. For comparison, there were fourteen missions in the Modern Warfare reboot and ten (with one mission split into two parts) in Black Ops: Cold War.
The latter of those games also saw you spending a lot of time in the briefing room planning missions out and was less linear at times. Beware of potential spoilers for the campaign that could be discerned from the names of the below missions.
Here's the full Call of Duty: Vanguard mission list;
- Phoenix
- Operation Tonga
- Stalingrad
- The Battle of Midway
- Numa Numa Trail
- Lady Nightingale
- The Rats of Tobruk
- The Battle of El Alamein
- The Fourth Reich
The story is told mostly through flashbacks helping teach us about each of the members of the Vanguard squad. Each campaign outing has a decent length to it meaning that despite there being fewer missions, the overall time spent with the story isn't much different compared to previous instalments.
Make sure you download the campaign when you first install the main Vanguard game files. For some reason, it will not automatically install with the rest of the game and needs to be manually downloaded.
The easiest way to do this is from the main menu in-game. When hovering over the campaign option, press Square on PlayStation or X on Xbox to trigger the download.