GamesFPSCall of DutyA leaked Call of Duty: Mobile skin turns a gun into a 3D animated WWII diorama where tiny little men fight and die in a miniature war, and it’s so absurd I don’t care how much it costsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesFPSCall of DutyA leaked Call of Duty: Mobile skin turns a gun into a 3D animated WWII diorama where tiny little men fight and die in a miniature war, and it’s so absurd I don’t care how much it costsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Activision)
“Don’t worry soldier, I’m with you every step of the way,” Bloom intones (it isutterly indistinguishablefrom a dozen such monologues in the Wolfenstein games) while one little soldier helps another one off the ground. “We stand together, we fight for the generations to come.” The helper soldier then disappears like an angel in a movie, with the one who got up looking around quizzically, before a faded black and white unit photo blows through the wind and sticks to the camera for a second before blowing away.
And you know what? It’s rad as hell, man. I’m not a microtransaction guy—I wrote afull screedlast year about how much I disliked a $20 suit of armor in Diablo 4—but this is sodifferent. Compared to thestultifying churnof Destiny armor sets with RGB lighting, CoD Prime guns with animated camo, or assorted celebrity tie-in skins, this freakish CoD: Mobile gun is like a thunderclap. The craft, whimsy, and cleverness of it genuinely impress me, while I also feel like it’s this example of conspicuous skin consumption brought to some kind of apotheosis—it’s a proverbial solid gold toilet, and I goddamn love that.
As for getting the thing, it’s unclear when it will go live, and you can forget prosaic complaints like “spending a lot of money.” Apparently, you don’t just buy things on CoD: Mobile, it has one of those intricate, tokenized, vaguely gambling-reminiscent monetization systems that put my beloved crusty old CRPGs to shame in terms of pointless complexity. PCG FPS specialist Morgan Park described it to me as: “You buy draws that get more expensive each time until you have every item in the pool. Simply unlocking this gun could cost $150, and leveling it up could be hundreds more.”
I’m going to level with you: That is the worst thing I have ever heard, but isn’t that excessive horribleness the perfect companion to the skin’s own sumptuous excess? Over on Call of Duty: Mobile, we are witnessing a new kind of surreal art that pairs the strangest work of gun view model crafting ever conceived with a microtransaction system that makes me want to go get beat up behind a bar just to feel something, and I think that’s incredible.
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