Call of Duty Vanguard Veteran Difficulty

During the weekend just gone, I decided to go back through Call of Duty Vanguard and complete the campaign on Veteran difficulty. I usually do it on my first play-through but for Vanguard (and actually maybe Cold War), I decided to play on Recruit first, to enjoy and get a feel of the campaign.

Overall, it wasn't a difficult campaign on Veteran and it didn't take much longer than what it took me playing on Recruit. Like other Call of Duty games, it had moments that took a bunch of restarting at the last checkpoint to get past, but nothing that made me turn off the game. I actually think over the years, the Veteran difficult has gotten easier, nothing can beat how easy the reboot of Modern Warfare in 2019 was though, I'm still sure that was a bug!

There were however, certain parts of the Campaign I wasn't looking forward to doing, based on how annoying they were when I first played them, not necessarily hard, just annoying. I thought I'd give a quick summary of my thoughts of each level and any parts that I felt were tricky.

Phoenix

First level of the game was never going to be too difficult, right? Well for the most part this level was okay, however there were some very well hidden enemies in some of the train carriages that kept catching me out. I think as long as you use the cover you have and push up the train slowly, this mission is easily doable.

Operation Tonga

This was one of my favourite missions in the game, especially the stealth start before you meet up with your team mates. I did expect the hill right before you reach the windmill to prove challenging and it did take me a few retries to get the right path but overall this mission wasn't too challenging.

Stalingrad

This was the first mission that had a section in I was really not looking forward to. About halfway through the mission, you need to rescue your brother from the Post Office, I remembered this part of the mission have a ton of enemies, who'd actively seek you out. When I played on Recruit, I did this whole section upstairs, looking down and using the sniper I had as much as I could until ammo had ran out. For Veteran I knew that wouldn't work, it barely worked on Recruit. On Veteran I firstly tried to "takedown" as many enemies as I could, without breaking out into a firefight, this worked somewhat as there definitely seemed a lot less enemies.

The enemies in this section definitely seemed a lot more aggressive, there was a lot more grenades being thrown. Luckily the character you play can sneak into vents and under tables so it made it easy to escape. It took me a couple of retries but it wasn't an area I was stuck on for very long.

The Battle of Midway

This was one of the levels I was fearing, it's not that long of a level but the controls of the plane make this level a bit of a nightmare, even on lower difficulties. There's 2 parts of the level where you have to perform a dive-bomb to try and destroy 2 enemy aircraft carriers, the carries have AA guns on them shooting up at you though so you have to dodge those bullets along with dodging the random explosions that happen around you.

Fortunately, if you don't move the plane at all, you actually don't get damaged enough to kill you, I'm not sure if this is the case on all difficulties or just Veteran but I just let the plane dive itself and once I got the prompt to release my bomb, I did so and passed both sections with no retries needed!

Lady Nightingale

I knew this one would take some time, it actually took me about 2 hours but I did have a small break in-between. Towards the end of the level, you end up in a Department Store, and have to ascend multiple levels of enemies. The enemies include regular enemies and also Jagermorders with sniper rifles. This one was more time consuming than anything, the Jagermorders did provide some challenge but once you get into the swing of things, it was doable.

The Rats of Torbuk

I really enjoyed this level when I first played it, it was even better on Veteran. I didn't really have any problems with it, other than finding the right path at the start when you ambush the Germans after destroying their tank but the rest of the level was pretty much plain sailing.

At the end of the level you do have to bring down a plane, this proved slightly challenging on Veteran as the plane does more damage. If you're stood out in the open trying to get a shot at it, it's going to kill you pretty quick. My advice for this is to stay close to the walls of the building you blow up last, get a couple of good shots on the plane and then take cover again. Do not spend too long out in the open as you will get shot.

The Battle of El Alamein

I think this was the level I struggled with the most. There were a few places that had me beat for quite some time including the assault right at the start of the level and then the section where you have to take out the multiple mortar teams. I actually spent a lot of my time waiting for my team mates to push up, I'd have to run ahead and trigger them to come forward but then I'd fall back and let them do most of the work. It seemed to work well!

The bit I was thinking was going to be the most difficult was the assault right at the end of the level when it's just you and Des, waiting for the bombs to drop on the enemies however this actually turned out to be one of the most easiest parts of the level.

The Fourth Reich

Finally made it to the last level, like other missions there were some challenging parts of the level but nothing that didn't take more than 3-4 checkpoint restarts. I found this level was actually quite generous with checkpoints so you didn't have to cover much ground before another checkpoint was triggered.

The part before you're outside on the airfield where you have to fight 4 Jagermorders was the trickiest bit, luckily though, as the team leader, you can command your squad to attack! So after 2-3 times of trying to fight them myself, I hung back and kept ordering my squad to attack whichever one was closest!

That's Veteran difficulty complete! As I said, it didn't take much longer to complete than running through it on Regular. I think the added difficultly but prior knowledge of the levels balance it out. I started it on Friday night, did the first couple of levels and then finished it off on Saturday afternoon.

Veteran was the last thing to do on the Campaign side of the game, I was hoping they'd be some "intel" to collect during it but nothing was mentioned! I'll be jumping into multiplayer next so I'll be posting my thoughts about that in the next week or so!