Project Phoenix in Call of Duty: Vanguard

The fictional program

Inside the game, Projekt Phönix runs from 1941 to 1945 under Untersturmführer Hermann Freisinger. The goal, as the wiki states it, is a “Fourth Reich” after Hitler’s death, built through a military coup and infiltration of the postwar government. Named members who end up dead in the story are Freisinger, Rommel, Leo Steiner, and Hezel, plus unnamed officers.

Call of Duty: Vanguard is a 2021 Sledgehammer Games / Activision title. Wikipedia files it under alternate-history treatments of the war. That filing is the cleanest way to keep a player’s plot summary from being read as a history paper.

The opening mission and three achievements

Phoenix is the first level. April 1945, Hamburg. You play Milos Novak. The squad raids a train bound for the city and a submarine base, hunting Phoenix documents. The level ends with Freisinger killing Novak.

Fandom lists three related achievements: Hello There for starting the campaign, Ticket Please for fifteen kills while standing on a train roof during Phoenix, and Beware Of Trains for shooting the driver of a troop truck during the mission. I do not have level-length numbers, so none are printed.

The historical program people confuse with this plot is the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which has its own page and its own decades.