REACTION - Call of Duty continuing to embrace Fortnite style crossovers feels like a dilution of the brand
Pizza and dosh.
By Jonathan Garrett
21/02/25
There isn’t anything inherently wrong with crossovers, especially if thematically the two properties connect and offer some degree of synergy. Take Helldivers and Killzone; the Helghast are an appropriately authoritarian regime that slots in perfectly with that world of managed democracy. The cosmetics offered also managed to look like something that you’d find in Arrowhead’s bug squashing universe.
And then you have Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arriving in Call of Duty. We’ve had rappers, horror characters, and even Godzilla, but this one feels like the final straw; if you’ve ever wanted to know when Activision officially jumped the shark, it feels like this moment right here. Now, to be clear, I have nothing specifically against TMNT. Far from it! It’s a legacy series that has itself produced some fantastic videogame adaptions (with the expected couple of stinkers) and as an IP remains recognisable to a broad swathe of players.
But I felt the same when Halo Infinite added anime cat ears; it doesn’t feel cohesive within the world already established. Now the devil’s advocate to this position would be to lighten up. Taking a series as fundamentally absurd as Call of Duty and drawing some arbitrary line in the sand when these games have long since embraced their own silliness would seem odd at best, and downright hypocritical at worst.
Your investment in this sort of thing is also relative to personal taste. Nothing is being forced upon you, and even though the total calculated cost of being able to actually purchase these various customisation items is quite steep, it’s ultimately something that can be ignored. If you want to use a vanilla skin and play the same rotation of three playlists like I do, then have at it.
But yet I can’t shake the feeling that this is a shoehorned effort, and one born out of necessity to appear relevant and / or engage the same types of players already invested in Fortnite’s full swing into meta references and reality breaking crossovers. But perhaps it’s redundant to wish for simpler times, when the industry has to evolve to survive.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
