Fast & Furious Crossroads review: This is not how you treat your family

Did you know that? Fast & Furious Crossroads existed earlier last week, when the game was released on PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One?

The game enjoyed almost zero buzz, except for a trailer debut in 2019 at The Game Awards. No review copies were sent to print, and there does not appear to be any marketing campaign for it – a bizarre situation for a licensed game tied to one of the most successful film franchises of all time. It features the imagery and voice acting talents of stars Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Sonequa Martin-Green, Peter Stormare, and Asia Kate Dillon, among others.

in spite of Fast & Furious Crossroads‘impressive cast and the success of their source material – although the release feels a bit more random now that the last Fast and Furious movie has been delayed a year – it looks like the game has been sent around the world to die fast , hopefully silent death, to never talk about again.

I understand that impulse, especially after playing the game itself. Fast & Furious Crossroads is not a total wreck, but the many basic problems destroy every chance it had to be comfortable.

A criminal underground of thieves of highways

Crossroads introduces a new crew of street racers and foreigners led by Vienna Cole (Martin-Green). They operate in the world of Fast and Furious movies, and when they find themselves over their heads, they reach out to a contact person who might be able to help: Letty (Rodriguez), who plays the rest of the ‘family’ gets involved.

The story revolves around a secret, historical underground criminal organization of highway thieves who collide with the game’s heroes, raising the stakes until cars fly through the air, removing belts and joining cars and mobile hacking platforms. It’s about what you would expect from a Fast and Furious story: minimal logic but a lot of chaos. The voice actors all sound like they are actually trying, which is a positive sign in this kind of licensed game, but the rest of Crossroads can not keep up with the cast’s attempts to make something out of this mess.

Image: Slightly Mad Studios / Bandai Namco Entertainment

You will master several characters in each mission, and sometimes jump between them several times in one mission, though the game will tell you when to do so. All the big stars are there, but it’s the newer cast members who do most of the heavy lifting. I would not even guess if any of this is considered canon, or anything that would even mean for this particular franchise.

Crossroads is not a racing game because so few of the missions involve racing. It’s not an open world game, because there is no open world, and almost no freedom in how you approach each mission or even how you get to the next section. It plays out like this: You learn something about the story, drive to the next area, maybe fight among other cars on the way, maybe do some stunts, maybe racing, maybe just drive. And then there’s another cut, and then you drive somewhere else.

There is no overworld map, and no way to explore these environments on your own. Instead, the campaign includes driving pieces, separated by cuts of characters talking to each other, before returning to the road to your next destination. Sometimes that station is a race; other times you have to fight rolling weapon platforms; and sometimes you’re just … driving to get somewhere.

Which is a problem because driving is restless. Each trip from point A to point B keeps you in a single path in the boxes, and that path is poorly communicated. That led to multiple crashes where I thought I could go somewhere, only to hit an invisible wall. The game includes takedown attacks that you can use to smash enemy cars into each other as the sides of the road, seemingly straight up from the Burnout series, but without any of the series attention to detail or sense of pleasure.

There’s a single camera angle, and it does a bad job of showing what’s going on. You can play with a keyboard on the PC, but the game will not tell you which buttons do what, and only shows prompts for controller. When and if you succeed in guessing which buttons do what, you just need to be aware that you are sitting with that configuration, because there is no way to change the keyboard controls again.

Crossroads explains so little. Despite admiring the idea of ​​a dangerous roadway in which I was carrying a volatile form of fuel that could blow when I got into an accident, it was embarrassing to actually do it. I could crash into so many things before the game finally told me that enough is enough. What is the difference between the first head-on collision and the third? I do not know.

The game would never tell me if my charge was inflated nearby until it did, and even then, I got no chance to see it. This is Fast and Furious – why introduce some amount on a vehicle bomb only to blow up the off-screen should you miss the challenge? Isn’t the whole series about cars foolishly jumping and furious as things from right and left blow up?

Stop all those frustrations and play linearly, and not even stop the basic driving controls Crossroads. It’s as if every aspect of driving, from acceleration to handling to the use of the handbrake and nitrous, were handled by a different team, each flipping a coin to see if they were looking for something like realism or an arcade. -style approach more suited to the feel of the series. The results make it next to impossible to figure out how my car will react to any situation until it happens.

Crossroads also has a multiplayer option, which at least sounds nice, but there are not enough people playing this game, so it is not viable unless you were looking for a “wait for a game” simulator.

All this, and publisher Bandai Namco is still charging $ 59.99 for the game at launch, while also offering a $ 29.99 season pass that lets you get “three add-on packs loaded with new cars, custom items” , and more! “

Average games happen, perhaps despite the best efforts of everyone, but it is this apparent attempt to launch the game under the radar, with recognition of big names offering, but nothing more than that, moving Fast & Furious Crossroads from the “these things happen” stack to the “transparent shopping” bucket. The good news is that, based on the 27 reviews so far on Steam (mostly negative) and the long wait to find someone to play with online, almost no one went crazy.

Fast & Furious Crossroads is now out on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The game was re-watched on PC. You can find additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.