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off a 2 year plan with one extra month free. Some people might have chosen to use the unexpected
downtime of the last few months to learn a new language or musical instrument; some have
taken up carpentry or gotten absolutely jacked. My girlfriend and I, on the other hand, started
a little project that saw us finally knuckle down and watch all of the Fast and Furious
movies in the space of a couple of months—I’m sure you’re all very proud of us.
All in, this ended up being incredibly fun; seeing this franchise, over a pretty condensed
period of time, turn from a plot about stealing DVD players, cashing in on early 2000’s
street racing culture, into this utterly wild globetrotting spy fiction thrillride as Vin
Diesel and his beloved family work with shadowy government organisations to find omniscient
tracking devices and stop sky fortresses from causing nuclear armageddon by… driving really
fast, I guess; its insane lore, absurd stunts and white-knuckle set pieces retaining just
enough of that self-serious boy racer drama to veer wholeheartedly into the realm of glorious
shlock. And it was precisely this shlock that made
the idea of playing recent release Fast and Furious Crossroads, newly equipped with this
knowledge of the entire series, so utterly appealing to me. That announcement that saw
Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez pull the whole “we’re gamers too” card at the
Game Awards with such genuine earnestness that it transcended a lot of similar celebrity
pandering at these kinds of shows; the gameplay reveal months later that looked more than
a little crap… but crap in a very specifically campy way. Hell, when you see names like Asia
Kate Dillon and Peter goddamn Stormare in the credits, you realise that even beyond
the cast of the films, they got some star power behind this thing. Despite the legion
of people talking about how awful Crossroads looked, there was part of me (a person who
loves to take outwardly terrible releases and try to find the good in them) that was
actually kind of excited to really get stuck into this daft, weird game.
It was one of those titles that you can imagine was simply a means of making a quick buck
releasing alongside the latest film, F9; just another way to get the words Fast and Furious
into people’s mouths, that they aren’t going to scrutinise too deeply, right? But
with F9 being pushed back to next year alongside, well, everything else, Crossroads has found
itself in a fairly precarious, but nonetheless fascinating situation. It’s a promotional
piece for a film that might as well not exist at this stage, crawling onto digital storeshelves
with zero fanfare to face the spotlight on its own; to be judged entirely on its own
merits. And, in that regard, said spotlight has not
been kind to this game. I don’t think anything could have prepared me for just how much of
a distaster this thing is. Let me put it this way—I never, ever thought I’d utter the
phrase “powersliding under trucks was easier in Ride to Hell Retribution,” but… here
we are. I’m really trying to rack my brain here, but for a franchise whose core has always
revolved around driving fast cars, this might actually be the worst feeling car game I’ve
ever come across; all in service of a story that really does its franchise no favours
in just how boring and disjointed it all actually is; with the best thing I can say about it
being that the three or four hours it’ll take you to beat is at the very least mercifully
short (but even then, as we’ll come onto later, there are even problems with that).
Truly, on every conceivable level, Crossroads is a catastrophic failure.
It’s hard to even know where to start here—down to the fundamentals, the simple act of rounding
a corner in this game feels awful. The handling model sees every turn start with a few frames
of moving slightly left and right before the car suddenly throws its goddamn back out and
you end up in a drift that isn’t really a drift—instead just continuing your car’s
path into the oncoming wall you were trying to avoid, just at a different angle. Getting
round a corner unscathed seriously feels like a miracle, as you otherwise attempt to regain
what little control you have over your pinballing death machine.
It’s impossible to tell which small ridges you can drive over, which of the obstacles
littering every part of the road you can plough through, versus the ones that will cause you
to come to a juddering halt (that is, if the game’s borderline broken technical state
doesn’t cause you to glitch through the floor instead). Said technical issues also
extend to the abysmal AI which, when its not enemies giving up entirely on the notion of
self-preservation, your allies constantly getting in your way, or the woefully limited
police chase feature that sees cops lose your trail when you intentionally defy the game’s
warnings of leaving the ill-defined mission area, will see civilians becoming the most
unhinged of the bunch as they somehow send each other flying across the screen without
provocation. Top all of that off with the shakiest camera
known to man—a brazen attempt to make the deceptively slow driving appear more frantic
than it actually is, while in reality making it nigh impossible to see what’s actually
coming your way amidst all the chaos—and you have one of the most sluggish, least readable
racing games ever. But then, I don’t know if I can even call
Crossroads a racing game per se. There are a couple of straight up races in there, but
whether you win or lose seems entirely dependent on the whims of the story. A good deal of
the time, then, is actually spent driving along a straight path, sometimes boosting,
ramming, hacking and firing your way towards bringing down the health bars of the occasional
bosses in front of you; all while switching between different characters.
And you might think, sure, that’s potentially interesting—it’s like a more strategically
varied version of Burnout, or something. The idea of each character handling a specific
part of a multi-stage heist or rescue mission actually fits fairly well with how set pieces
in the films tend to work. And well, that might be the case if you were ever given any
real choice as to how you pulled these encounters off; the game instead more or less dictating
exactly who you’re going to be at any given point; which highly specific ability is required
for this part of the mission. Hell, even the Burnout comparison isn’t
particularly valid, as the grunts that attempt to distract you from the bigger task at hand
operate with similar rigidity to the bosses. You’re not trying to carefully judge the
exact right point to throw the weight of your car at an enemy in order to send them cascading
off the track—even the more lowly enemies have health bars that drain at the exact same
rate every time. Nudging does a set amount of damage, missiles do slightly more… you
know, rather than feeling like a real forceful impact caused by your understanding of the
game’s physics, the whole thing turns into a game of painting by numbers—waiting for
your ability timers to fill up so you can press the right button when the game tells
you to in order that the story can keep going. It seems odd to describe a game like this
as “aggressively linear” but I really can’t think of any other phrase for it.
As I say, it’s not a racing game, it’s barely even a driving game honestly—feeling
like it has more in common with a quicktime event-driven interactive movie than it does,
say, Split Second or something. But as that interactive movie… does it work?
I mean, the Fast and Furious franchise ain’t exactly Oscar-worthy; it’s great because
it’s so dumb. Wouldn’t it make sense for a gamified version of that kind of kitsch
to be a little rough around the edges? It would if the game was at least exciting in
its awfulness—when you find yourself driving a big slow truck up a hill for waaay too long
or engaging in an excruciatingly drawn out tailing mission or having to slow down to
a crawl in order to hack a target thanks to the game’s ridiculously bad lock on system,
you might think, these are not the kinds of objectives that you want out of a Fast and
Furious game. The way Crossroads has you engage in its pretty nothingy story is… messy to
say the least. Where the films would use a five second establishing
shot to show you where the characters are, Crossroads has you driving along entirely
uneventful roads for minutes at a time. Then, however, you’ll get to HQ, be told that
the crew needs to find a certain type of car, only to cut at whiplash inducing speed to
you having already broken into said car and being told to escape from… wherever the
hell you just transported to. In other words, they padded out precisely the sections that
needed to be dramatically shortened, while flat out deleting scenes that would give you
any context for what it is you’re being told to do—it’s not dissimilar to how
a game like The Quiet Man failed to convey appropriate information to the player.
This kind of unevenness makes itself apparent in the game’s dialogue too—where Letty
will say “there’s too many of them! They’re too tough!” and your character responds
with “Letty’s right! We can take them!” It sounds like there’s lines missing or
something. But even if you sort out the weird pacing
issues and the like, it still leaves you with a pretty dire script plagued by worse delivery.
You still get the occasional neat little references to events from the films, and some of that
hokey charm from the films where characters that have shown no previous technical know-how
will talk about how they “just need to get closer to the signal so they can sneak past
the mainframe” like they’re suddenly hacking wizards, but what Crossroads forgets is that
as the films gradually moved in this more campy direction, they also introduced increasingly
bigger personalities to go along with it—Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez and Paul Walker
(god rest his soul) were suddenly accompanied by people like The Rock and Jason Statham
providing endless opportunities for one upsmanship in the intensity of the quips and insults
thrown. Here, thanks to delivery that sounds less
like people gleefully shouting to be heard over the roar of engines and more like they’re
quietly chatting around a table, lines like “I thought I was going to hurl on the way
up here!” as you’re escaping a dangerous rockslide and “You know what’s torture,
being stuck in a room with you!” really stick out like the clunkers they are. During
my playthrough it didn’t strike me as some knowing attempt to evoke the juvenile, playful
tone of the films as much as it brought to mind that Bubsy game that came out a few years
back. I hate to say this, but despite the star power behind it and the franchise the
developers are working with, everything about Crossroads just feels so amateur.
Which makes it all the more genuinely shocking that this game was developed by none other
than Slightly Mad Studios, the team that made Project Cars. Now, I’ve written about a
lot of incredibly confounding games on this channel in the past, ones that have gotten
me questioning the very foundations of the medium they’re so bad, but this fact right
here—that the developers behind one of the most robust, detailed racing simulators out
there right now, somehow managed to follow up with this—is honestly confusing me like
very little else I’ve covered up to this point.
Perhaps even more confusing than that, however, is the sheer cost of this thing. I don’t
normally talk about pricing in reviews because I don’t necessarily believe that value is
equitable to a game’s length, but… jesus. This isn’t a budget title—this isn’t
even full-price. This three to four hour experience costs £50 (or around $65). They are charging
beyond full price for this, and what’s more, there’s a season pass! For the online mode!
Did I mention there was an online mode?! Yup! And in order to get the most out of it,
to get the… cars and… skins, I guess, they want you to pay… and I swear I’m
not kidding here… £25. They want you to pay almost $100 to get the full experience
out of this dross. But… you know the worst part? The reason you’re still seeing single
player footage right now? I literally couldn’t play it. Believe me, I tried. I tried for
so long to get one match in this online mode and, at the time of writing, I just could
not get into a game on PC. I couldn’t tell you what this apparently crucial component
of Crossroads is like because no one is playing it. The most I ever got in a lobby at one
time was three people—myself included. And all of this stuff really is the killer
here; why I can’t recommend even hardcore enthusiasts of crap games to check this one
out. So far I’ve named Ride to Hell, The Quiet Man and Bubsy in comparison to Crossroads—this
should be the gold standard of that specific kind of shite game that really needs to be
played to be believed, but in actuality it’s nowhere near as wacky or fun as those comparisons
would suggest. What we have in our hands is a ludicrously expensive game that barely works
and, worse, is just kind of boring to boot. I can barely tell you a single thing that
happens in the plot it’s so forgettable, delivered so monotonously. Rather, it’s
the contextual stuff that’s actually the shocker here; that, after so long of tie-in
games existing purely in the realm of cheap-to-make, free-to-play mobile time sinks, here we have
a return to the full-blown console releases of yore—and lo and behold, it’s as rubbish
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hope you enjoyed this piece on Fast and Furious Crossroads!
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episode of Writing on Games. Thank you so much for watching, stay safe and I will see
you all next time.