So first off, I believed Crossfire X to be a Warface style game, essentially a free-to-play alternative to big shooter franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield, that swaps out the scale for charm. (I actually haven't played Warface for almost five years now. I hope it's still got that B-game charm.) And I guess that's somewhat true in the free-play department at least. Yes, provided you have an Xbox, you can play Crossfire X right now with your Game Pass subscription, or just free from the store page, apparently. Yeah, I literally just redeemed it right now, which made me wonder what the point of having a Gamepass integration even is, until I looked again and realised that Crossfire X offers it's bare bones basic online package for free, but the newly released Remedy Co-written campaign costs money or a Gamepass subscription. Woah, but back up for a second there... Remedy co-wrote this campaign? The Alan Wake, Control, Quantum Break, guys? Well that's something to write home about, right?
No. God no. CrossfireX made a single campaign for the game already without the help of Remedy, and it was all total mediocre bargain bin COD with enough faux-military dialogue drivel and gratuitously awful acting that it would make your typical Steven Segal movie just green with envy. For this sequel (kinda) plotline, Remedy took the mediocrity of that original as a direct challenge, to see if they could make something unquestionable worse. And they did exactly that, well done guys. Seriously, I need to know exactly what Remedy did to contribute to this storyline, because it is burning me up inside. Those guys are storytelling kings to many people out there! I mean, I don't particularly care for their stories to the same degree as a lot of other do, but they've never been anywhere near this bad! All I can think, is that Smilegate Entertainment periodically sent off their script to Remedy to do spelling checks, and that's the extent of this partnership. That's the only possibility which makes sense to me.
Operation Spectre, as the Remedy-assisted campaign is called, tries to marry it's poor military-fiction-written-by-teenagers plotline with some sort of sci-fi messianic prophecy story that combines about as poorly as that sounds, develops with agonising contrivance, and results in a Crisis 'homage' sequence that is so pathetic I consider it a direct insult to the game that they are ripping off! (I mean: 'paying homage to') Oh, and the acting is that special brand of lazy where you can hear the actors speaking with this harsh-yet-subdued tone, as though trying not to wake their parent's in the next room over or something. Every actor sounds like that. I don't know if it's a problem with the mixing, just crappy source audio or simply no one cared enough to try an iota in the booth. Assuming they had booths. (Nothing is a given for a game like this.)
The cutscenes are good, and here's another thing that doesn't compute with me. The animations, the movements, they're all fine- but then the voice acting is freakin' C-tier and I have to wonder why nobody found all of this objectionable. There seems to be a lobotomized head stuck on all the enemies for the way the AI seems incapable of any dynamism whatsoever (Just run to the spot you've been told to and stand there shooting- not exactly a real enemy AI set-up, now is it?) Actual shooting itself is said to be pretty bad, although there's no way for me to confirm that without picking up a controller and- yeah, I'd rather shoot myself. (The game is 55 Gigs, I'm not downloading all that just to see if the shooting is as bad as people say.) And the dialogue writing is so close to plagiarism at some points, that if I were in their shoes I'd have my lawyers deployed and on standby.
One line really triggered me, and it was an of-hand exchange between two rando's in a level. They're enemies bemoaning how the bad guy General of the game ordered a missile strike on this position despite knowing that his people are there. They have this drawn out chat about questioning superior officers and all that jazz but all I could do was circle back to one nagging thought: This is just that iconic Modern Warfare 2 line rewritten to be less snappy. Do you remember the line about Shepard? "'Isn't this a little 'danger close' for the Task force?' 'Since when did Shepard ever care about 'Danger close?'" It's the same bloody line. They stole it and made it worse! Did they really think no one would notice an iconic line from a beloved entry in a global phenom franchise being stolen? This whole game is a maddening decent into whos, whys and hows.
What I can't understand is this: How did this game make it into the Microsoft game lineup? Seriously, this is an embarrassment. Xbox has been trying for an age and half to compete with Sony's cadre of quality first party games, and this is the best Microsoft can come up with? Exclusive rights to fisher-price COD? Is this what exclusivity looks like under Xbox? Because if not, then why wasn't this game buried under the deepest recesses of Gamepass so that it couldn't draw attention with it's vaguely impressive gameplay trailer made up of entirely hand crafted set-piece moments and surprising quality cutscenes? The profile this release had was the most noteworthy thing of the whole package, and that is owed solely to Xbox marketing. For shame, Microsoft. For shame.
It's not often that we see big 'so bad their good' games do the rounds, and that's typically because of a bunch of reasons, such as that games are usually so bad they're awful and frustrating, when we do get a bad game it's more a shame because you can see the hopefulness behind it, and that most of the titles that reside in that sweet-spot inbetween those extremes are buried beneath the deluge of Steam new release shovelware. So in that backhanded sense I suppose Microsoft have done us a solid by providing this unabashed mess of a game, with money and talent behind it, which is microtransaction strewn, for the world to laugh at. No guilty feelings here, I can point and laugh all day! There is so much more about this game which is borked, including the many lacklustre multiplayer options, but you'll have to see if for yourself from people who actually had the gumption to play the thing because this is a mess that needs to be seen to be believed.
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