Call of Duty: Vanguard, the latest installment in the long-running shooter series, launches this week, with a new story campaign, multiplayer, and Zombies mode, but you won’t have to wait until the release date to experience part of one of these components. The first hours of Vanguard‘s campaign have already leaked on YouTube, as discovered on a Reddit thread.
The footage introduces the fictional multinational special ops task force sent into enemy territory to stop Nazi Germany’s plans in the final days of World War II. The story begins with the daring infiltration of a German train that transports the squad to a U-boat base in Hamburg. This leads into a massive firefight through the base and into the close quarters chaos of a Nazi submarine. Eventually, the squad comes face to face with one of the game’s main villains before moving on to the next mission, as British paratroopers land over Merville, France during Operation Tonga. The mission is a good showcase for the game’s stealth and squad command mechanics.
As of this writing, the footage is still up, and seems to be part of a Let’s Play that went live on YouTube just a tad too early.
If Call of Duty story campaigns aren’t your thing, there are still a few other things to do in the new WWII installment — the first 2017’s European Theater-set action game. (You won’t find Josh Duhamel in Vanguard, though.)
The game, which was primarily developed by Sledgehammer Games, will also ship with a multiplayer component featuring 20 maps across the Western, Eastern, Pacific, and North African fronts of WWII. In a first for the franchise, Treyarch will provide a new Zombies mode for another studio’s Call of Duty game. Vanguard‘s Zombies mode is billed as “a crossover [that] connects with the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Zombies storyline,” according to a press release. Activision confirms that Vanguard will build off of the Zombies lore established in Cold War. IGN revealed that the new mode will explore “the birth of the zombies.”
Raven Studios is also working on the Vanguard experience, primarily as it pertains to Warzone. The popular standalone battle royale mode is getting a new Vanguard-inspired map set in the Pacific. It’s called Caldera and it’ll be the first new setting introduced for the game since it launched with the Verdansk map in 2020, which is good news since some players have been asking for a change of scenery for quite a while. The bad news is that the Caldera update won’t launch with Vanguard this week, so fans will have to wait a little longer for the new map to drop.
The rest of the Call of Duty: Vanguard experience will launch on Nov. 5 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.