Ghostpirates Ahoy! Call of Duty: Ghosts' Next DLC Is Weird

Call of Duty: Ghosts seems to have rediscovered a bit of the Quake and Half-Life mod scene spirit. Hear me out, right. I know it's all usually very po-faced and dull, but the next DLC map pack seems to throw together whatever weirdness its creators found kooky or funny or cool--as so many mods did. See, 'Invasion' will bring ghost pirates and mariachi revenants and I'm surprised to find CoD DLC making me nostalgic. It's just a shame this attitude is confined to paid DLC.

One of the DLC's four new maps gives players the ability to summon ghost pirates who roam around murdering the living, as well as fire support from a pirate ship. Another, set during a Dia de los Muertos celebration, lets you become a mariachi armed with two revolvers which turn enemies you kill into temporary bandmates. The 'Extinction' cross-DLC co-op campaign continues to be weird sci-fi with giant monsters. Earlier Ghosts map packs added Predator and Michael Myers too, because why not? The end result is like so many "And I like this movie and that game and those comics and OH wouldn't it be zany if..." mods I come across in my mod readme file obsession. What would happen if you gave an excitable teenager a heap of money? Maybe this.

CoD DLC does tend to dabble in the weird more than the base games but look at all of this silliness:

This being a Call of Duty game, it'll cost you. Ghosts map packs go for £11.49. Ignore the June 3 release date in the trailer: that's for Xboxes as Microsoft has paid Activision to delay DLC by a month or so for everyone else.

I'd hope that the newly-announced Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare will be more fun, seeing as it has robosuits and magic wall-climbing sticky gloves, but it'll almost inevitably be so serious about it all. I would like to see how weird the DLC gets when mechs are considered mundane, though.