Video Game / Call of Duty: Mobile

Soldiers unite. Together we fight.

Another entry to the long-running Call of Duty series, developed by Tencent Games' TiMi development team and published by Activision (Garena in South East Asia), it was released in early October 2019 after several region limited closed beta tests.

The game combines content from many Call of Duty games, mostly the original Modern Warfare trilogy and the Black Ops series in a faithful recreation of Call of Duty multiplayer, along with a Battle Royale Game mode which plays like Blackout from Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, as well as borrowing some gameplay features from Call of Duty: Black Ops III such as Operator Skills.

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This game provides examples of:

• A.K.A.-47: While some weapons retain their real names, some are changed, such as Cheytac Intervention being called as "DL Q33", the Winchester Model 1200 (W1200) as "BY-15", the AKS-74U being renamed to "RUS-79U" in Season 3, the SCAR-H to "DR-H", and the Karabiner 98 Kurz bolt action rifle being called "Kilo Bolt Action".
  • Following Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)'s example, the KRISS Vector is renamed as the "Fennec", and the FAMAS is introduced as the "FR 5.56".
  • Misidentified Weapons: The "M4" in the game is actually a Cobalt Kinetics AR-15 instead of a Colt M4, though the LMG variant does actually resemble the M4, but with drum ammo by default.
• Allegedly Free Game: Surprisingly defied as no matter what tier or rarity the guns you have, the stats are none too different (the difference between Blueprint and normal weapon are only the weapon attachment arrangements apart from the appearance), ultimately skill matters more in multiplayer. Perks, and with the addition of Gunsmith customization as of season 9 update, gun parts are level unlockables instead of bought.
• Ammunition Conservation: In "One Shot, One Kill" mode, the player only has limited ammunition, and must therefore try to limit their shots to when they are able to score a direct hit. Successful kills are rewarded by having the spent cartridges replenished.
• Anonymous Ringer:
  • The opposing forces are instead "Special Forces" and "Guerilla Ops" and both use the same announcer. Both use the same models too, although the opposing forces always glow red from the player's side, regardless of the faction.
  • The "Crash" and "Crossfire" multiplayer maps, originally set in the Middle East, has all Arabic markings and signs changed to English.
• Anti-Frustration Features: In all game modes apart from Ranked Mode (though it includes Battle Royale, which is ranked separately), if matchmaking took longer than expected (around 30-60 seconds) the game will commence anyway, with vacant spots filled with bots.
• Bad Santa: The Christmas event introduced the Battle Royale boss Zombie Santa, who has stolen everyone's presents and is taking them to the Circus.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: The default Zombies boss started with a menacing hellhound, similar to the Cerberus boss in Battle Royale. The Abomination promptly kills it and takes over as boss.
• Battle Royale Game: This game's Battle Royale mode is inspired by the Blackout game mode from Black Ops 4 with some different mechanics and weapons.
• Bilingual Bonus: The Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 characters speak untranslated Japanese in combat, with a bit of Gratuitous English here and there.
• Bowdlerize: Bloodless Carnage is in full effect in Chinese version of the game, replacing the bloody screen damage borders into black or gray-ish shade. The Snoop Dogg cameo is replaced into a soldier wearing full-face covering armor as well.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • The now removed Zombies mode had Wonder Weapons with special perks which could only be bought by opening Loot Crates. These kinds of weapons were especially important on later survival rounds when the zombies became very tanky.
  • The gun blueprints, aside from looking "cooler", allow you to obtain better gun accessories earlier than intended. Battle Pass as well as exclusive rewards has its procurement guaranteed while some are locked in Loot Crates or Lucky Draws.
    • Certain Epics (usually ones found in crates or lucky draws), Legendaries, and Mythics have iron sights that either obstruct less of your view or are basically built-in dot sights or scopes, which negate the need to mount an optic and therefore grants you a precious attachment slot.
• Capture the Flag: The "Capture the Flag" mode has two teams trying to capture the enemy's gold and retrieving it to their base.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers:
  • Item rarity is tiered: White < Green < Blue < Purple < Gold < Red. Weapons above the green tier have some minor perks in Multiplayer games. In Zombies Mode, weapons with higher tiers did more damage.
  • Attachment rarity in Battle Royale is also tiered: White < Green < Blue < Purple < Gold. The differences between these items in the original Battle Royale Mode are documented here.
• Combat Resuscitation: When playing in duos or squads in Battle Royale, players can be knocked out and then revived by their teammates. If a person bleeds out, they can still be brought back into the match if their team scans their dog tag.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Bots have a nasty tendency to snap onto and One-Hit Kill you. Watching killcams most egregiously show them aiming at your feet or even the ground next to you and somehow scoring headshots.
• Crossover: A massive one of the many Call of Duty series, mostly the original Modern Warfare trilogy and the Black Ops series, but also Advanced Warfare, Infinite Warfare, and Modern Warfare (2019).
  • In 2021 it has also crossed-over with Girls' Frontline, featuring the AN-94 T-Doll as an unlockable cosmetic for Scylla, and certain weapons in-game getting skins that refer to their corresponding T-Dolls.
    • 2023 sees another major CoDM and GFL crossover, this time featuring T-Dolls M4A1 and HK416 as operators Dusk and Kestrel.
  • And in 2022, the game has two more crossovers: one with Chinese 3d animated series Ling Cage and the other with the Netflix series Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, the latter even featuring Major Kusanagi herself as an unlockable operator.
• Denser and Wackier: Garishly colorful uniforms and skins for characters and weapons are commonplace, and one of the Operator Skill is a blade that plays Naruto-style music as the user slashes the enemies with increased agility. All this against a setting where a global cyberattack has put much of the world in chaos.
• The End of the World as We Know It: The Four Horsemen cyberattack, which resembles the Menendez cyberattack in Black Ops II but in a global scale, happened in the comic book storyline to coincide with the Anniversary season event. A song with its namesake was even featured on the promotional video!
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Just bumping into something can cause substantial damage to most vehicles. One or two rockets or a good bullet spray can make any vehicle explode.
• Expy Coexistence: Futuristic, fictionalized weapons, especially the ones from Black Ops II and Black Ops III, coexist along with their "real" counterparts. Such as PDW57 along with P90 (the latter of which is renamed CBR4) and M4 with ICR-1 (though the latter resembles HK416 more)
• Fake Difficulty: Zombies in this game used to be even bigger bullet sponges than their console counterparts. This could be partially solved with traps, which always insta-killed anyone who fell into them. Patches later made them equivalent to their mainline counterparts, and like their counterparts, eventually amp up on Endless to very tough-to-kill.
• Falling Damage:
  • Classic mode has some fall damage, though it can be reduced with the Lightweight perk.
  • Downplayed in Battle Royale, where there's little to no fall damage since the character's wingsuit usually opens before falling a great distance.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • The Annihilator in Black Ops III is described as being able to break the arm of an non-augmented soldier. Because Operator Skills are not unique to specific characters in Mobile, it can be used by operators that don't have any cybernetics.
  • Prior to a 2021 retool of the gameplay mechanics (see Regenerating Health below), robotic player characters need to use medications to restore their health.
• Genre Shift: Most Call of Duty games are psuedo-realistic in nature, with a few going into conspiracy-theory Mind Screws, but the storyline shifted from typical Call of Duty fare to something out of an action-adventure flick, with milennia-old conspiracies brushing up against rogue AI, kung-fu fights, Ghost in the Shell being canon, and even bits of crime drama.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The boss monster in Battle Royale, which can be summoned by going to a red marker usually at the farmlands. Used to be there to foreshadow Zombies mode, but even after the Zombies mode was removed, the boss monster is still retained (as for the zombie itself, it is retained for one of the class ability, sending zombie as a bait to distract an enemy).
• Guest Fighter: There have been numerous crossovers complete with playable Operators.
  • Season 3: Tokyo Escape hosted the "80s Action Heroes" event alongside Black Ops Cold War and Warzone, releasing bundles including John Rambo and John McClane.
  • Season 7: New Vision City, the Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 collaboration, gives us Motoko Kusanagi, Batou, and Togusa, with the Tachikomas as vehicles.
• Hero Shooter:
  • Battle Royale players can choose from at least six different classes (though as of the first anniversary, the classes has been increased to nine), each with their own special abilities and perks.
  • Breach mode downplays this a little by using four classes that resembles Battlefield's, but lean harder on the Hero Shooter aspect.
• Hit Stop:
  • The replay footage of the final kill in a match is dramatically slowed down.
  • The last kill in Battle Royale is also slowed down to give this effect.
• Loot Box: Come in two flavors, the traditional Loot Crates and the roulette esque Lucky Draws, in which Lucky Draws price are rising after each attempt, but you can't get duplicate from the lineup.
• Missing Secret: The Zombies mode stats can still be seen even after it was removed. Also, there is a menu to choose character clothing and headgear since the first release, but such customization hasn't even been implemented as of now despite huge UI changes.
• More Dakka: Heavy machine guns like the S36 and RPD have magazines with 75-100 bullets, though they do slow down running speed significantly.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The M1911 is named "MW11" in this game. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was set in the year 2011.
• Nazi Zombies: Downplayed in Zombies mode. While it's mentioned that the area house is actually a secret research facility from World War II, it's never explained exactly where the hordes of zombies come from.
• No Plot? No Problem!: Nearly all the game modes, with the exception of a few Singleplayer missions, Zombies, and Breach, don't really have something resembling story or coherent continuity. The player just follows what the unseen Commander says. Each season's Battle Pass starting from Season 6 (2020) include tie-in comics readable in-game that fills the operators' backstory related to the season's theme along with a continuous story arc with exclusive continuity unrelated to the main series' continuity as it puts together characters from various games that have different timelines. However, to ensure character customization freedom, none of the story elements carried over to the gameplay, so you can have Price, Soap, and Ghost fighting each other in an average multiplayer game. The exceptions are a story tie-in of the equivalent of Task Force 151 facing off against the Atlas corporation that's determined by players aligned with either faction winning matches, the Breach mode which is the same not-Task Force 151 raiding the Tontine in a version of Ground War, and some single-player missions that serve as tutorials and promos for the comics.
• Regenerating Health:
  • Played straight, even though in the Multiplayer mode, the HP is visible both in HUD and above every player as in the fourth Black Ops game, which averts this.
  • Before the 2021 retool of the gameplay mechanics, averted in the Battle Royale mode which plays like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, regenerating health in the BR mode can only be done by using healing items. After the 2021 retool, health will regenerate but the maximum amount is considerably low, so players have to look for armor plates to repair armors, which replaced all the healing items.
  • Also averted in 2v2 Showdown, where health cannot be regenerated in any way.
• Revenue-Enhancing Devices: The controversial Mythic series of weapons, a far more futuristic look of existing weapons as well as featuring unique effects such as dismemberment, exaggerates this trope, as sets of its attachments are unlocked via Mythic Cards, which are attained using COD Points, first, the Ascended weapons require a lot of (paid-for) COD Points or plain luck on the player side. Then to unlock the rest of the attachments the players need to obtain Mythic Cards, again, paid-for. The gun stats itself are actually unchanged compared to the normal versions of the guns, despite looking like buffed in stats, by applying the same gunsmith gun parts.
• Rewards Pass: One of the way to be guaranteed to obtain rare and exclusive rewards that shifts monthly. Also by completing the rewards on the players own (instead of buying levels), players are guaranteed to have their initial Battle Pass purchase amount refunded.
• Schmuck Bait: One of the Battle Royale classes is Trickster, which sends out two holographic images of the player and disguises that player as a holograph.
• Self-Plagiarism: This game and PUBG Mobile are both published by Tencent Games, specifically while PUBG Mobile were developed by Lightspeed & Quantum, COD Mobile were developed by TiMi, who had once made a Chinese-exclusive PUBG Mobile: Army Attack that was released concurrently before it was replaced.
  • Both games have similar controls and game modes, so players can easily switch between playing these games.
  • They also have similar monetization schemes, with Battle Passes, Loot Boxes, and special events.
• Soft Glass: The windows in Battle Royale can be broken by climbing through them.
• Tank Goodness: A tank may appear randomly (it used to be always during its first appearance) during the last quarter of Battle Royale match, and one of the events involves constructing the tank by collecting its parts.
• Temporary Online Content: Any collabs will be unavailable for purchase after their initial run. At best, the items may return with the Serial Numbers Filed Off, as was the case with the Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045-themed Mythic Switchblade draw where Motoko Kusanagi was replaced with CoD-original character Florence Carter and the title was renamed.
• Vocal Dissonance: Some voice clips just do not belong on the characters they're given to. For example, most of the generic Special Forces characters are given British or Russian accents (despite using the character models for SEAL Team Six), while Takeo Masaki, who is Japanese, shares a voice with Templar, who is French^note This is due to the fact that his voice actor, Tom Kane, has retired from voice acting due to a stroke.
• When Trees Attack: Zombies mode had a tree monster boss called Jubokko which could be unlocked by collecting various Easter Eggs around the map.