It’s safe to say Call of Duty Warzone doesn’t have the best reputation. A quick glance at the Steam listing will show that the reviews are mostly negative. While this isn’t surprising for a free-to-play PC game filled with greedy monetization, Activision still thought it wise to port the game to mobile. So we’ve known the game was coming for some time; however, Activision wouldn’t let me test the game early under the excuse that it’s a live service. Of course, the game has been in testing on mobile for a long time now, so I had to assume why Activision didn’t want me to see the game until it launched. My assumption was correct; Call of Duty Warzone Mobile stinks; it plays like a generic battle royale made for the purpose of extracting as much money from the playerbase as possible, which sure lines up with the PC and console versions and their low user review scores.
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Above, you can watch seventeen minutes of gameplay consisting of two early matches, recorded by yours truly. I played using touch controls and autofire, and this was a clear mistake. Like many mobile battle royales, matches contain bots, but thanks to the popularity of the Call of Duty brand, the game is already filled with sweats as well. This is a problem because the matchmaking doesn’t account for new players or what controls are chosen, so you are thrown to the wolves immediately instead of being provided the room to learn the ropes, where half your encounters stand still, and the others jump around like the sweats they are. There is nothing fun about this as a new player, Call of Duty Warzone Mobile will never be one of Android’s best FPS games.
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Everyone loves forced tutorials
Especially when there are three back to back to back
Despite the fact little is explained about the core gameplay, you are forced to go through three separate tutorials. These seem to only exist to keep you playing while locked out of the game’s menus (where the awful monetization is revealed). This is done on purpose for retention, as games like this are created from the ground up using metrics, and metrics deem that the longer you keep new players playing, the more likely they return. So instead of using these three tutorials to relay anything useful about the core gameplay of a battle royale, its weapons, its armor, or anything else, they are used to show you how to shoot and walk, as if either of these extremely basic mechanics are unfamiliar to anyone playing a shooter. It’s very easy to see how players are pushed in certain directions to do what the developer wants, which ruins any immersion there is to be found. If I can constantly see the strings you are pulling to corral your players, you’ve failed as a game developer.
Performance stinks
And for some reason, the game targets high-end smartphones
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Beyond the wasted forced tutorials and sweaty matchmaking that ignores skill level or what controls are used, performance also isn’t great. Now, you’d think the developer would focus optimization around low-end phones, as the entire point of bringing Warzone to mobile is to bring in players who don’t have a way to play on consoles or PCs. As in, developing countries that primarily use budget smartphones would ideally be the target, and yet performance is clearly tuned around the high end. The Play Store is awash with reviews complaining about performance, and so is the subreddit, going back well into the beta. Little was done to address any of the game’s known issues before release, so you’re going to need a very powerful phone to get close to a stable framerate.
In my testing, I saw an average of 40FPS during my shooting sessions on high graphics with the framerate uncapped, playing on a specced-out ROG Phone 8 Pro. I saw 60FPS when walking around, but the second any action starts the framerate tanks. Even crazier, there is a Peak graphics setting above High, but I have no idea who this is for as it is unavailable on my ROG, which, last I looked, is the most powerful gaming phone on the market right now. So, who is this setting for, what phone can utilize it, and why in the world do the graphics go this high when all the player complaints are focused on the horrible performance on midrange and low-end phones? It seems to me the developer has its priorities extremely out of whack, which isn’t surprising for an F2P game from Activision.
Of course, the poor performance may be explained by the engine used. Instead of using Unity or any other mobile-friendly engine, Call of Duty Warzone Mobile is built on the same engine as the PC release, IW 9.0; it’s just toned down for mobile. This is precisely how you get poor performance on anything other than the most powerful smartphones; the game was never designed to be played on mobile in the first place.
Get out your wallet
As expected, unabashed greed is on display
Then there is the monetization, and as expected, it is heavy-handed, on par with gacha games. I find the $30 price of the battle pass insulting, straight up. You could buy a premium game for that, one that isn’t filled with jank performance and questionable monetization. There are also skins for sale, where gun and player skins go for $20 a pop. Craziness. Sure, these are cosmetics and aren’t necessary to play, and they can even sync across your account to be available in other Warzone games, but the blatant greed is still hard to ignore; it’s clear what the game was designed for.
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Hard skip
The game is junk, yo
Overall, my time spent with Call of Duty Warzone Mobile wasn’t enjoyable. The framerate isn’t stable when it’s most important, the matchmaking is abysmal and leads to immediate frustration, the touch controls aren’t viable, the heavy monetization is gross, and the generic battle royale gameplay is as stale as ever. I’d say Call of Duty Warzone Mobile is at least five years too late to jump on the battle royale bandwagon, but it hardly matters when so much is wrong with the game. As yet another battle royale on mobile, it’s forgettable, and that’s being kind. Of course, if you’d like to check things out for yourself, you can grab the install from the Play Store widget below. But in my opinion, Call of Duty Warzone Mobile isn’t up to snuff, and I don’t see it getting better anytime soon.
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Danh mục: Review game