CrossFire was an online tactical FPS, like CounterStrike, that was very popular in Asia for many years. According to Wikipedia, it first released in South Korea in 2007 and has grossed an incredible amount of revenue, well into the billions, since its launch. I actually had never heard of the game, but online multiplayer is not an arena I enter often at all, so perhaps that’s not surprising. I also had not heard of CrossfireX, the freshly released Xbox exclusive that was co-developed by Smilegate and Remedy. Yes, that Remedy — the studio behind several great games, including Max Payne, Alan Wake, Control, and even Quantum Break was pretty good. This game had backing from both Microsoft Studios and Remedy, so I felt like it had to be a hit, but I was surprised that it got so little press before being suddenly released.
Well, upon first launching the game, I quickly began to piece together what I was getting into. The UI was the first warning — you can use some of the buttons on the controller to navigate, but the primary means of UI navigation is with a tiny, slow-moving, mouse cursor, indicating this was a sloppy port from PC development. I found the menus to be confusing, too. There were lots of miscellaneous options and loadouts and stuff like that, I’m sure people who play online FPS games regularly might not have been as confused. Regardless, it took me a few seconds to realize I had to download the two single player missions separately, so I got those downloading and continued perusing the menus, coming to realize that, wow, most of the weapons and items and things were behind microtransaction paywalls. The experience was feeling like a poor Call of Duty rip-off and a bait-and-switch, but then I remembered the campaign trailer I saw the day I received the review code, and thought that surely there was something good waiting there.
The campaign is extremely short, maybe five hours total, and is split between two missions, Operation: Catalyst and Operation: Spectre. Catalyst is free with GamePass, while Spectre is an extra $10. Or, you can buy either for $10 each. There is also the $30 Ultimate Package that includes both single player campaigns, Premium Battle Pass Season 1, and Premium Weapon Unlock – Gatling Gun Gold Wing — yeah. Anyway, Catalyst is told from the “good guys” perspective, while Spectre is a story about the bad guys. Bear in mind these were developed by Remedy Entertainment with their Northlight engine, so expectations are high at the outset.
I went into Catalyst and was “treated” to a trope-filled modern day military shooter, complete with all of the uber-typical design elements and story-telling mechanics that you would expect. Any chance of an interesting, multi-layered story for either of these campaigns is nixed by their laughable brevity, as each campaign is under three hours long. You begin by playing as a character named Hall, who is part of a four man spec ops force. Your role is general assault, and along with you are Randall as sniper, another dude as the heavy gunner, and Cavanaugh as the leader. You work for the Global Risk private military faction, and are being dropped into a fictional country to try to find the leader of Black List, another private military group. Of course, things go sideways quickly and the whole op is blown, in short order. The opening minutes introduce you to the controls, including a bullet-time mechanic that slows everything down for you, making it easier to pick off the enemies. This ability refills on its own pretty quickly, making the game that much easier to play through.
Even while using the bullet-time mechanic, I found the aiming in CrossFireX to be poorly done. I tinkered with the sensitivity settings and eventually found an ok setup, but I was surprised I had to mess with those settings at all. Anyway, gameplay was starkly generic as I continued to play, but a tipping point for me was when Randall, the AI-controller sniper dude and I, were working our way towards a communications tower. Randall was going to be my overwatch, providing sniping and spotting assistance while I had boots on the ground, doing the close-range assault stuff — ok, cool, very typical, but that’s fine. Well, as I got into combat, I could see the enemy AI doing the stupidest things, including walking right past me, shooting at Randall. I even walked circles around the bad guy, and he didn’t care, he was shooting at Randall. And for Randall’s part, he was sitting up on one knee, at the edge of a rooftop near the gutter, bleeding as he was getting shot, but of course he wasn’t going to die because that would have broke the game. So I just shot the bad guy and moved on. It was ludicrous, though — this is indie studio or amateur fan made crap, not 2022 AAA backed studio level-work. I was floored at the growing pile of grievances that this game continued to serve up.
Playing through the campaigns was mercifully brief, clocking in at about four-and-a-half hours, which is crazy-short, but then again this isn’t a typical release. The experience was awful, and not fun. It was so generic, so uninteresting, and so poorly done that I was glad when it was over because I felt like I was using up my precious time when I have so many games in my backlog and new games to be playing.
I dabbled in the multiplayer for a very short while, and found nothing redeeming with it. The Classic Mode is meant to be like the old CrossFire, with no aiming down the sights except on sniper rifles, and no sprinting. The Modern Mode has the Tactical Growth System and Killstreak system, whereby you get perks like increased fire rate, faster sprinting, the ability to slide, shield unlocks, and a few others, but these do not carry over from match to match. Anyway, there are just a very few maps available, none of which standout.
Regarding currency, there are three types in CrossFireX. GP is for basic weapons, skins, and characters, but CFP, which is only obtainable by spending real money, is for purchasing premium weapons, skins, and characters. CFP is also the primary currency for The Black Market. The Black Market is another cash-grab that offers up one item at a time. The more of this junk you buy, with real money, the better chance you have an opportunity to buy, with real money, rare items. With so much push for microtransactions at every turn, it just felt all the more shady, underwhelming, and frustrating.
CrossFireX gets little to nothing right, and I don’t take pleasure in saying that. On a technical level, yeah the graphics and framerate and such aren’t bad, but you won’t get to enjoy them because I think you’ll be too distracted with all of the other problems in the game. Voice-acting, the script, the AI, controls, story-telling, the intensely lazy and generic feel of it all, the push for microtransactions — the game is asking players to overlook or otherwise deal with too much. Now, I am an optimistic and forgiving person by nature, but what SmileGate, Remedy, and Microsoft have done here is absolutely regrettable. This game has issues that even patching cannot fix, and I’m typically the first one to point out that games can often be much improved by patching. CrossFireX, though, has problems that run too deep and too broad — and I can’t recommend this game to anyone.
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