Call of Duty is better when it costs $1000 instead of $570

It's not a surprised that Call of Duty has gained a rather rocky reputation in the last couple of years. Despite a promising future from Modern Warfare in 2019, the quality & business practices of Activision's darling shooter franchise has gone down hill. The most recent game, Modern Warfare 3, has been called a $70 dlc or Modern Warfare 2.5. It was revealed as a broken promise as Activision had stated with the launch of Modern Warfare 2 that they would finally take a break from the traditional annual release cycle. And man, how did this game prove that cycle desperately needs to be broken.

I'll admit that at first I was skeptical of MW3's reveal. I was upset at the announcement & the promise being broken. Modern Warfare 2 was in a bad state itself with a lack of support & neglect of community feedback. It was fair of anyone to expect an awful, unfun, & scummy game to be released. When the multiplayer beta released about a month or two before the launch window, I was surprisingly impressed. It felt like Sledgehammer games decided to listen to community feedback. It pulled back from Infinity Ward's attempt to turn Call of Duty into a tactical military slog. The maps were fun to play on as they were just remastered maps from the original Modern Warfare 2 in 2009. I found myself hitting the pre-order button not too long after. I could only hope that the rest of the game was good.

MW3 launched with the shortest campaign of any Call of Duty (with the exception of Black Ops 4) & a number of bugs that resulted from the clearly rushed production. I couldn't tell you how many things my friends & I found. If you tried to open attachment slots on certain weapons, it crashed your game. Some guns just had missing descriptions. The UI had not changed from the previous game so it was still horrible. It's safe to say that not many people were impressed.

I bring this all up because I recently began playing Call of Duty Mobile on my PC via the Gameloop emulator. It's janky, has poor performance, worse graphics, and yet I'm having so much more fun that the mainline, $70 game. I'm not expected to be an elite gamer having to try my best in every match. I just get in there & smooth my brain over with dopamine for 5 or 6 minutes. There's always new stuff I'm finding because of the years of support Call of Duty Mobile has recieved. Maps from CoD4 to Black Ops: Cold War are in there. I can spray & pray with a soviet PPSH-41 in a cyberpunk version of Nuketown. It's just pure fun.

When you factor in the cost of the device you play your game on, I still think Call of Duty Mobile is a better deal.