News - Call Of Duty: Warzone Mobile Review
successfully bringing well-known console games to phones and tablets requires hitting a very specific balance. You want the mobile version to feel like the same game people already like, while acknowledging that using a touchscreen device usually means playing for a short period of time on something that's not designed for games.
Call of Duty: War Zone Mobile is a pretty ideal demonstration of hitting that balance; it maintains all the most important elements of the PC and console War Zone 2.0 EXP experience while tightening everything about it to be quicker and more concentrated. This is essentially a sped-up version of The War Zone, which fans already know and enjoy on mobile.
The main mode of six available at launch looks and feels almost exactly like its PC and console counterparts, but only on a slightly smaller scale. Matches are only 10 minutes long, squads are locked to three players, and a lot of the loot you find is generally of higher quality, so you can get effective guns quickly.
The map is also smaller, confining you to a specific zone of Verdansk, which is the original war zone map that launched in 2020. The result is a mode that lets you whip through fun and intense Battle Royale matches at a fast clip, getting all the same highs with a lot less downtime. If you're familiar with Call of Duty's take on the mode that PubG spawned and Fortnite picked up and ran with, then you already know everything you need to know about how War Zone Mobile Apart from some slight smart variations meant to speed things along, the war zone formula continues to be a fun one thanks to its specific elements.
You'll drop into matches with 36, 60, or up to 120 players and search for weapons with which to fight other people who you run into either alone or in squads of varying sizes. The map includes contracts you can complete to earn money, which you can then spend on armor and killstreaks. In the main modes, dying sends you to the goog, where you fight another defeated player for a chance to respawn.
That's still an excellent mechanic that adds a lot of intense and exciting battles to matches; everything functions just as you know it from the usual war zone, making it possible for veterans to pop into a mobile match and have fun immediately. What takes some getting used to are the controls. While the touch controls work well enough, they always feel cumbersome, specifically in fast-paced competitive play.
You can instantly tell when you're facing someone using a console controller via Bluetooth or a backbone-style attachment because they jump and slide in ways that are difficult to manage with touch. Controls—in short, a controller is recommended if you care about your kill-death ratio. At the same time, it's totally understandable if you tough out the touch controls, because War Zone Mobile is something to take out of your pocket to play for a few minutes at a time, and they're all smart adjustments that boil the genre down to its best parts.
For instance, there's no real inventory management to speak of if you're carrying a gun or a kill streak and picking up another one, just swapping them. Loot is kept simple, so your choices become about finding the sorts of weapons you prefer. It all comes together to put War Zone Mobile's focus on getting you to the action-packed moments quickly, making just about every match harrowing and exciting with a lot less time spent on logistics or running around a huge.
Map, in addition to a solo and squad version of Mobile Royale, there's also a more traditional four-player squad mode with 20-minute matches if you want something a bit meteoric but still quick. There's also rebirth and revival. A war zone mode that takes place on its rebirth island map and does away with the goog instead respawning players periodically as long as their teammates stay alive, making it a fun and chaotic change of pace.
The speedier matches add a pressure cooker aspect since any opponents you fail to kill can quickly be reinforced, and staying alive yourself is crucial to keeping your team going. The mode takes the action of mobile Royale and can stretch it out into heart-pounding hide and seek battles and their specific idiosyncrasies.
You can change your priorities slightly as you hunt down opponents, and you can also play some Back to Basics 6 on 6 Call of Duty multiplayer with the mosh pit and shoot the ship modes. Mosh Pit cycles through several objective game types on some well-known maps, while Shoot the Ship does the same thing, but on only two modern warfare maps: shoot house and shipment.
While half the available modes right now are just variations on the mobile Royale theme with differently sized squads, the variety is a nice way to shake things up and keep War Zone Mobile feeling compelling even if you're not in the mood for Battle Royale. That makes this feel more like a scaled-down take on traditional Call of Duty than it does a compromised mobile version, so you're best off playing both this and the console or PC version because War Zone Mobile includes cross-progression.
It's a phenomenal addition that instantly makes this more enjoyable if you're already a War Zone fan. Not everything transfers, but a lot of the most meaningful stuff is available in both games. Your battle pass progress, your purchased character skins, and most crucially, your unlocked weapons and saved loadouts.
If you've got guns you love and loadouts you're practicing with, signing into your Activision account means they're already waiting for you in War Zone Mobile, and rewards you earn or changes you make here transfer back to wherever they can. War Zone Mobile makes it as easy as possible to play and enjoy.
Another upside of cross-progression is that War Zone Mobile's monetization scheme is nearly identical to its big siblings, and a lot of the skins and blueprints you can buy in one game work in the other and carry all the same prices. The only trouble is that the whole system is a bit confusing. This little chain link icon means these all work in all games, but some might be specific to one version of War Zone or the other.
War Zone Mobile warns you that you can still buy items in the War Zone Mobile store even if they don't work in War Zone Mobile. Currently, there don't seem to be any items that you can buy that don't cross between the games, but the suggestion means you'll need to be careful about pulling the trigger on purchases to make sure you're getting exactly what you want for the game you intend to play.
The paper-thin barrier of entry, especially for established Cod players, is the best thing about War Zone Mobile. It feels like a new slate of options for playing War Zone, accommodating you when you're not at home or when you've got friends who favor phones over consoles, without losing much of what makes it such a popular game.
