A 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 costs

pcgamer.com:

This leaked Call of Duty: Mobile skin is a gun turned into a battlefield, a miniature battlefield with tiny men who run around on top and fight and die, all while carried by a tiny guy who lives only to fight and die on a miniature battlefield inside of your phone, which is in turn held by you, a tiny person who lives only to oh God.

Let's back up here. A video of this upcoming skin for CoD: Mobile was shared to YouTube by Alyn Gamer, and I barely know where to start with the thing⁠—it hardly resembles the historical MG 42 machine gun it replaces. You're essentially holding a long chunk of terrain with a tank and crashed fighter plane lodged into it. The battlefield is crisscrossed by a tiny stream towards the stock of the gun, and little guys can be seen running around and shooting at each other between anti-tank obstacles.

For the weapon's «reload,» an offscreen airstrike destroys the tank, with the player lodging a new one in like they're replacing a mag. The pièce de résistance, though, is the weapon inspection animation: The camera zooms in on intensified combat on the diorama while some real classico WWII music with sad strings plays, followed by a rousing speech by none other than Brian Bloom, voice actor for Wolfenstein's BJ Blazcowicz and Varric Tethras of Dragon Age.

«Don't worry soldier, I'm with you every step of the way,» Bloom intones (it is utterly indistinguishable from 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 a full screed last year about how much I disliked a $20 suit of armor in Diablo 4⁠—but this is so differ