Also available on PlayStation 4, Stadia, and Windows

Years ago, I picked up The Division right when it came out solely based on how interesting the setting looked.  Unfortunately, the game itself was, while not bad from an objective sense, very disappointing to me.  As such, I avoided The Division 2 when it came out.  I figured it would be more of the same, and I really wasn't interested in wasting time or money on that.  My friend-slash-only-slightly-kidding-husband, Grant, however is a huge fan of the game and decided that he wanted to play it with me badly enough to buy a code online and give it to me to download.  So here I am with The Division 2 downloaded on my Xbox.

The game takes place a little bit after the first one, but instead of New York City, the setting here is Washington DC.  That's already something I like better.  The set-up of the game is identical; first person shooter action RPG, you have to be online even if you're playing solo, and you've got a main quest line with a bunch of side quests that range from substantial and story-related to utterly pointless.  If you played the first game, you know how this one is going to go.  Unfortunately, the story isn't really any better.  There are a handful of factions fighting over control of DC, and you're an agent with the crumbling federal government.  None of the characters are particularly memorable, and the story is about as generic and uninspired as it gets.  Still, though, the missions themselves are a lot better designed than they were in the previous game.  The first game felt genuinely monotonous pretty much from start to finish; if you were playing with friends, it was downright boring at times.  This game, however, is at least fun to play, and the mission environments are a lot more varied making the locations at least interesting even if what you're doing with respect to the narrative and world isn't.

Generally speaking, FPS RPGs are a hard sell for me.  It just bothers me when I shoot someone directly in the fact with a sniper rifle, and it only takes away like a tenth of their health.  I'll fully admit that this isn't exactly a consistent complaint as it's never bothered me in other RPGs when stabbing an enemy through the chest with a sword only takes away a tenth of their health, but for whatever reason, my disbelief is a lot harder to suspend with shooters, so this was never going to be a game "for me," so to speak.  That said, I have to admit that I do enjoy playing this with Grant.  It looks good for a last-gen game even if the faces and hair have some jank reminiscent of the Mass Effect trilogy, and it the gunplay is really solid feels great.  There is, of course, your typical Ubisoft shenanigans with bugs here; I had missions not trigger properly, enemies just kind of float in the air, and menus bug out on occasion.  Note the way my character is sitting "in the boat" in the screenshot below.  Still, though, it was much less of a buggy mess than most of Ubisoft's games, so kudos for that, I guess.  I did, however, play two years after launch, so I feel like that's kind of praising the bare minimum.

The Division 2 is a solid FPS RPG, and while the story and characters are still just as boring and bland-as-can-be as the first game, the actual gameplay and mission design have been significantly improved, and I feel like that's definitely the most important thing here.  I, as a rule, despise games that require an internet connection despite being playable completely solo, but if you can find this on sale for $20 or less, I can't say that it's a bad purchase provided that you have friends to play with you; it's definitely fun if you've got a team.

Also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Windows

I'm one of the relatively few gamers who buys the new Call of Duty game most years almost exclusively for the campaign.  It's the reason I didn't buy and will never buy Black Ops 4 (that and my eternal grudge against using Roman numerals but stupidly stylizing it "IIII" instead of the proper "IV").  That's not to say that I don't play and enjoy the multiplayer - in moderate doses, I quite enjoy Call of Duty's multiplayer - but my primary reason for buying them is always to play through the campaign and get a good power trip from experiencing a story from the perspective of a uncommonly skilled soldier.  I also will go to my grave saying that World War II is the absolute supreme setting for a war game and that Nazis are the eternal perfect enemy; they're just damn killable.  When Vanguard released not only with a superb looking story but also set once again in World War II, I was pretty immediately sold on it.

Vanguard's campaign has a "main" protagonist who serves as the narrator for the duration of the campaign, but the gameplay is split between several protagonists whose histories you see via flashback missions.  Normally, I'm very picky about games with multiple protagonists because it often leaves me feeling interested in a number of characters but not satisfied with my time with any of them.  As such, I was a bit skeptical when I first fired up Vanguard and realized that that was how this was going to play out.  Fortunately, the writers went above and beyond here and not only kept the story firmly anchored to Arthur, the "main" protagonist, but they also went and created one of the most interesting and well-told stories Call of Duty has ever featured with a team of characters that mesh and flow together better than pretty much any game in the series.  Whether you're seeing the Battle of Midway, the Battle of Stalingrad, or the Second Battle of El Alamein, Vanguard's campaign delivers an exceptional experience in both narrative and gameplay in a genre that normally does well with either one or the other but rarely both.

The multiplayer is, as usual, exactly what you expect.  If you've played one Call of Duty multiplayer in the past decade and a half, you've pretty much played them all.  Like every other Call of Duty you've played, the multiplayer is smooth, varied, and has a very well fleshed out loadout and perk system.  I mean, seriously, what am I supposed to say?  Activision prides itself on making this crap virtually identical from game to game save for the setting and weapon choices especially once Warzone came out.  I've played a couple hours of the multiplayer, and it's a lot of fun.  I though Cold War's multiplayer was more fun, personally, but that's just because I like more modern guns for multiplayer; World War II is the supreme setting because I like to kill Nazis and storm the beaches of Normandy, not because I'm attached to the MP40 or Sten.  Still, though, if multiplayer FPS is your thing, Vanguard's is as solid and polished as every other Call of Duty game released during my students' lifetimes.

Now to disappoint every Call of Duty player reading this; I don't care for Call of Duty's zombies mode.  Don't get me wrong; it's fun.  I just think Sniper Elite did the concept of "Nazi zombies" infinitely better than Call of Duty ever could.  The storyline they build around it is stupid, the zombies' designs and behavior don't feel as quintessentially "zombie" as Nazi Zombie Army, and if I want a fast-paced zombie shooter, Left 4 Dead is better in every way.  As such, I only played a little of the zombies mode just to say I tried it out.  It's fine.  That's about all I have to say about it.  What is worth mentioning, however, is the performance and visuals.  Holy shit, this game looks gorgeous on PS5.  The pre-rendered cutscenes especially look almost indistinguishable from live action video in some scenes.  Unfortunately, I did run into a few performance hiccups where the game would seemingly get "stuck" for a second or two before jerking back on pace, and in one or two instances, this would put the cutscene's audio about half a second off from the video which was jarring.  I assume this is just an optimization issue that will probably get smoothed out in a future patch, and it only happened two or three times during gameplay, but it's definitely something worth mentioning.  I'm not sure if this happens on Series X and Windows or just on PlayStation 5.

Call of Duty: Vanguard is an exceptionally good shooter, and in my opinion, arguably the best World War II shooter in the series.  I'm personally a bit more fond of the original Call of Duty, but if I'm being honest, I think that's probably just my nostalgia for early 2000s FPS talking.  The multiplayer is as fun as ever, the zombies mode is cool if that's your cup of tea, but the campaign...dude, the campaign is fantastic.  The characters are amazing, the story is great, and the battles and Nazi murdering are endlessly satisfying.  If you're like me and enjoy the campaign of these games as well as the multiplayer, you absolutely need to pick up Vanguard.  If you just play Call of Duty for the multiplayer, then it's going to depend a bit more on your preference of setting.  Still, though, I was pretty impressed with Cold War's campaign, and I think Vanguard surpassed that one.