When I heard PUBG was coming to mobile phones I couldn’t believe it. How could they possibly pack the full PUBG experience on to a small device? It turns out they did it by streamlining the experience without dumbing it down. Things like automatically picking up guns and putting on the best attachments; getting rid of almost all the gates and windows; taking all the interiors out of houses so it is easier to move about, and adding in a few bots (okay a lot of bots) to limit the CPU resources. All these changes make sense for the platform, and Tencent should be commended for somehow making mobile PUBG feel like PUBG.
Granted there are a lot of hoops to jump through at this juncture to get PUBG installed. If you are on Android like me, you need to download the Chinese app store TapTap, give it all the permissions you can, and then find the real PUBG. Not the one with navel combat and whatnot. If you can’t read Simplified Chinese, it is the one with the 8.8 user rating. Once that is installed, you need to create an account with one of Tencent’s social media platforms, QQ or WeChat. QQ is easier since all you need is an email address, and you can go to zz.qq.com and sign up in English. Then you need to go to the Play store and install the official Chinese QQ app and sign in. Once that is done, you can log in a play PUBG on mobile! For Apple folks you will need to create a Chinese Apple account, so you will need to get a temp Chinese credit card number, so good luck with that. Then still sign up for WeChat or QQ.
Was it worth all the hassle, not to mention giving all my info to China to play PUBG on my phone? Probably not, but it is a lot of fun, and probably one of the best mobile games out there right now. I just hope that they create an official international version of the game soon. That way I will not have to keep looking up what the menu buttons are. Oh well, at least the gameplay doesn’t need to be translated. Find cool loot and then survive until the end. As Sam Eagle would say, “It is the American Chinese way!”