The Fast & Furious movies are something of an enigma. While the first two movies did relatively well, the series got more and more popular as time went on, eventually turning into one of the most successful film franchises of all time. What started out as a simple street racing film slowly became this action-packed spectacle of these racers, this “family”, working alongside a shadow government agency tasked with saving the world, because why not. Each subsequent film got more over the top and outlandish, and you would think the vehicular antics would translate to that of video games so perfectly. While that might still be the case down the road, Crossroads fails tremendously in making that a reality now.
While licensed games haven’t had the best track record, there have been some solid hits over the past few decades; Vin Diesel’s own Chronicles of Riddick, Simpson’s Hit and Run, South Park: Stick of Truth, Goldeneye, The Arkham Trilogy, and even a few of the Lord of the Rings games were actually pretty impressive as well. Most licensed games are usually developed to coincide with the release of a film, usually having drastically short development cycles that often hurt the overall product, and while the latest Fast and Furious movie has seen a delay due to current world issues, Crossroads is here and frankly, should have seen a delay to improve the game across the board or frankly, a cancellation wouldn’t have been a bad idea either.
While I will sometimes have access to a review code here and there, Crossroads was a title that I purchased on my own to review, and while I found it not surprising that no reviews were available before launch, which is a troublesome sign to be sure, I decided to take the plunge and see just how bad this game could actually be. While going into a game with a negative mindset isn’t probably the best way to go about it, the trailers and all footage leading up to its ‘somewhat out of nowhere’ release didn’t provide any sort of positive anticipation towards the game. When it was first shown off at the Video Game Awards last fall, the game looked awful, featuring extremely bad visuals and gameplay that didn’t look inspiring in the slightest. Many people took to Twitter to point out how bad the game looked and hey, I was one of them. Cut to release and it’s exactly how you think it was going to be. Was Bandai Namco aware of this? Well, think about how well this game was advertised and you’ll have your answer.
Crossroads tells a very loosely connected story that takes place after the events of Fate of the Furious, the eighth film in the franchise. It’s unclear at this time if this will connect to the upcoming ninth film, but I guess we will find out next year. While its story is largely built around a duo of new characters, Vienne, and Cam; Dominic, Letty, and Roman, all voiced by their respective actors, are here to provide backup in their mostly limited roles. While the movies are not known for their engaging and thought-provoking narrative, the story that is present here is instantly forgettable. As Dominic and Letty open the game, they come into contact with information about a shadowy organization of highway thieves called the Tadakuhl that is apparently the “real deal”, but the game does absolutely nothing with this concept. While it eventually leads our heroes to our villain, played by Peter Stormare, the game doesn’t really dive into this organization, and almost all of their lines are about the confidence their mission is going to succeed and that our heroes are “too late to stop any of it”, despite clearly having enough time to stop all of it.
After leaving Miami after a street race went horribly wrong, Vienna Cole and Cam Stone head to Barcelona to try to make something new of their lives. When trouble finds them, Vienne turns to an old friend; Letty, and she then introduces the pair to Dominic and Roman, who just happen to already be investigating the exact same people that have crossed into their lives; how fortunate and not at all predictable. Now, when it comes to the characters, their models, and the voice work by each of the actors, it’s a mixed bag for sure. Star Trek: Discovery’s Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays Vienna, looks exactly like the actress and is frankly, the only character besides Peter Stormare’s Ormstrid who even looks remotely like the actor. Everyone else feels like they were created from memory, especially Vin Diesel, who’s character model just looks eerily off. Visuals aside, the voice acting is ok at the best of times to sounding like the actors were bored at the worst of times and that’s usually the case here during much of the game.
Most missions will see you swapping from character to character on the fly as each will be driving a different vehicle equipped with some sort of gadget needed to take down your target. You’ll be able to strip away parts of vehicles with a harpoon or have blades spinning at your wheels to destroy an opponent’s tires, but these mechanics feel rather spotty in their execution, especially the tire blades that are hit and miss when it comes to actually working as advertised. While you might assume that different vehicles mean they control differently, such as maybe Dominic’s car is needed to speed up to the target a bit faster since it has more power under the hood, or that someone else’s ride might be better for maneuvering, that just isn’t the case here as each car handles just as bad as the next. While the game is built around driving, this isn’t exactly a racing game as while there are two missions that revolve around racing, the rest of the game is built around driving to a target, smashing opponents as they drive alongside you and then letting the strangely dark contrast cutscenes play out with its forgettable story.
The world you drive around in is just as lacking in detail as well; there is no map and while it feels like a large open space, it’s littered with limited access to roads, invisible walls, or neighborhoods that have weirdly designed dead ends, and to top it off, a few levels have time limits to put an end to any notion of exploring. Oddly enough, you can cause untold chaos to any vehicle on the road consequence-free, even the cops, and unless cops are part of the mission, they will just drive away, despite you literally flipping them over and crashing into them. The few races in the game also don’t have any sort of course map and the visual language given to you on certain turns and paths are only limited to the few highlighted arrows that border around just a few parts of the course. This isn’t helped any better by the tightly pulled in camera that does a really bad job at showing you what is going on, reducing your peripheral greatly. In fact, when you jump over any sort of jump or incline, your car blocks everything in front of you for a few seconds, something that is incredibly annoying during a level where you’re being chased by an avalanche of rocks behind you and have to navigate around obstacles on your way down the mountain.
Cars themselves are just not fun to drive and reminds me of when third-person action games used to have those awful driving levels where you could tell the developer wasn’t familiar with racing games and you would often crash into barricades and struggle to even make sense of just how bad the driving felt. The problem here as while that is all present from a gameplay perspective, the team that made this game has almost nothing but racing game experience, being the developers of certain Need for Speed and Test Drive titles, and not to mention the fairly well-received Project Cars series. Yet, somehow, not a single part of driving here feels enjoyable at any point, which, in a game that is nothing but driving, is a major problem. While some missions have super fun concepts, such as barreling under a massive drill, or racing alongside a speeding train, the controls and feel of driving simply ruin any fun the game wants to achieve. Cars have an odd weight to them and turning at high speeds is not enjoyable as every vehicle has a floaty drift to them, and should you smash into something, and you will constantly be doing just that, the amount of time it takes to put the car in reverse and get going again is beyond sluggish, especially when you have less than 10 seconds before a cop arrests you and it takes nearly 8 seconds to just get to a starting speed. Combine that with having to time certain button prompts to use your gadgets, all while trying to keep an eye on the road, which is often blocked by your car, or too dark to even see what’s in front of you, and you have all the elements needed to cause a tremendous amount of frustration across nearly every mission.
As you drive, you’ll be slamming your car left and right into your opponents, something that was immensely enjoyable in another Vin Desiel game, The Wheelman. Here, it feels generic and the takedowns feel like a cheap knock-off of Burnout. The Fast and Furious movies are often around crashes and spectacle, but the game doesn’t really go to those highs. Your car will have a health bar and while you can certainly take a pounding, the health bars feel largely unnecessary and seem designed to instigate yet another fail state to pad length to the experience. The game also has a very slow feeling to its driving, and the boost has such a long cooldown that you’ll wonder where the “fast” is in this Fast and Furious game. This makes trying to drive alongside targets like a train or speeding truck far too annoying as they either drive way too fast for your normal speed or far too slow to your boosted speed, meaning you’ll going to fail timed mission after timed mission as you try to line up your car to destroy their tires, via a mechanic that has spotty hit detection, or drive alongside them long enough for someone to leap from your car to the target.
Packaged alongside the 4-hour campaign is Online Ops, a multiplayer mode that has you gaining experience to unlock new cars, paint styles, license plates, and other customizable options for your car. Online Ops has you joining one of three factions as either a cop, hero, or villain, and your objectives vary from protection, destroying, and racing to a safe zone. Now, the biggest issue facing this game is that hardly anyone is playing this, I’ve spent hours trying to matchmake into even a single match, often getting to 7 or 8 players and then people start dropping like flies and the search begins again. With Bandai Namco charging full price for this, it’s ridiculous that half the game is barely even accessible unless there is some sort of audience for it. There is also a season pass that is really relying on this mode taking off but since it’s nearly impossible to consistently get a game going, it’s hard to say how viable that pass and this mode will be months from now. While the few modes I was able to actually join went off without any significant connection problems, most players were ignoring the objective and just crashing into each other. While that can often be an enjoyable time, the controls are just painfully bad to the point where you’ll be crashing into anything and everything as you race after other players in uninspired and disappointing environments.
Price at $59.99USD/$79.99CAN, with a $29.99USD/$39.99CAN season pass, I don’t know what Bandai Namco is thinking. The campaign is laughably bad with a story and presentation that doesn’t do the series justice, a film franchise that is so over the top and silly that you would think it would be the dream video game, but this is not it. While Slightly Mad Studios has had a history of making stellar racing experiences, it’s hard to say just exactly what went wrong here. I kept trying to think about something positive within the game, but with the bland and generic visuals, the huge drop in performance when any cutscene started, to the painful character models and acting, it just becomes clear that this was a cash-in game developed with zero passion or care. It’s unpolished, ugly, and is a disaster to control.
Fast & Furious: Crossroads was purchased by the reviewer and played on an Xbox One X.
All screenshots were taken on an Xbox One X.