Crossfire X Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Asian multiplayer phenomenon gets a Remedy for western success
Publisher Smilegate, Xbox Game Studios
Developer Smilegate, Remedy Entertainment Format Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Origin South Korea, Finland
Release 2020
Back in 2019, just as free-to-play multiplayer shooters seemed to be all anyone was playing, Remedy bucked the trend by releasing Control. But even as the Finnish developer was bullishly making its case for story-led solo games, it was also hard at work collaborating on the world’s biggest free-to-play multiplayer shooter.
That would be surprising enough had it meant 100 Max Paynes running around an island. But the game on which Remedy is collaborating is one you may not even have heard of, despite it being the world’s mostplayed, with one billion players at last count. Tactical FPS Crossfire is the work of South Korean developer Smilegate, and across Asia on PC it has racked up numbers that would make Fortnite and PUBG green with envy. Even so, it was pretty much unknown in Europe and the US until the announcement at last year’s XO19 that a console version, Crossfire X, is coming to Xbox One – with a fully-fledged singleplayer campaign provided by Remedy.
At first it seems an unlikely pairing. Remedy is a tour de force of singleplayer storytelling, as evidenced by Alan Wake, Quantum Break and Control. However, most war-based shooters tend to eschew invention in favour of machismo and pseudo-political flag-waving – worlds away from the more out-there concepts with which we associate the studio.
“If you think ‘Remedy and a military firstperson shooter’, most people do a doubletake,” admits executive producer Tuukka Taipalvesi. “But then when we started to dig into the game, we realised what kind of chances and opportunities it gave us. If you play a lot of the different multiplayer modes in Crossfire, they go really out there – it’s super-strange at times. That really plays to our advantage. If the original IP already has some Remedy qualities to it, or oddities, we can play around with that and extract as much fun for us as well.”
Those Remedy qualities are central to Crossfire X’s campaign. Art director Mikko Kinnunen is keen to assure us it has all the studio’s distinctive flair, with the aid of its Northlight engine, that will make the game stand apart from other military shooters. “When we think about a firstperson shooter, household names like Call Of Duty and Battlefield come to mind, but Crossfire X is a much more character-focused game. And especially on the art side, we’ve been much more inspired by games like Metal Gear Solid, even Resident Evil, when it comes to the aesthetics and adding more out-there ideas, and merging that with what we’ve come to expect from an FPS. There’s definitely still a lot in Crossfire that’s unexpected.”
Unexpected or not, in creating Crossfire X’s campaign, Taipalvesi and his team have had
to wrestle several apparent contradictions into submission. First, retaining Remedy’s knack for originality while fleshing out a well-worn, even clichéd, theme of two military forces clashing in worldwide warzones; imbuing characters with likeable personalities and then putting them in a uniform with death-dealing weaponry; and, not least, weaving a convincing narrative around a battle-arena shooter that a billion players have already made their own.
Our first proper look at the campaign suggests that Remedy has reconciled all these different elements. Throughout different story chapters, Crossfire’s warring military factions, Black List and Global Risk, are both playable. Neither is represented as good or bad: there’s a grey area that allows the narrative to show the conflict’s alternate perspectives and reveal the game’s characters in a more meaningful way.
The South American-set Operation Spectre pitches freedom fighters Black List as protagonists, and here we meet one of the playable characters, Luis Torres, a skilled thief who has been captured by the authoritarian Global Risk. When his prison bus is bombed, Torres is taken to a nearby hospital, where he is liberated by Black List. Now armed and in firstperson control, Torres breaks out of the medical facility via intense shootouts along hospital corridors and through bombed-out buildings, the action running at a smart 60fps on Xbox One X. The subsequent vehicle chase, with Torres and chatty partner Cora firing from the back of an ambulance, is thrilling, silly and nicely scripted and paced, hinting at the potential for some quality Remedy storytelling yet to unfold. Typically for the Finnish developer, there’s a signature gameplay mechanic here too – a version of Max Payne’s bullet time called the ‘combat breaker’. A perkstyle ability powered up by kills, this unleashes a slo-mo period that allows you more time to think, target and surprise enemies.
The dichotomy of war as an entertaining narrative is something else its storytellers had to resolve. There is destruction and bloodshed, but Remedy’s character-led approach keeps things lighter than, for example, some of Call Of Duty’s more controversial campaign moments.
“It’s not a super-real, angsty take on war,” says Taipalvesi. “While Crossfire has always been fast-paced action, it’s a military shooter in an entertainment wrapper. So we are able to do the Remedy way of building characters that have backstories and do not have just one function. Hopefully we are able to bring these characters to life as members of these factions – they display the themes of their teams, but at the same time they’re individuals that have their own pluses and minuses.” Kinnunen agrees: “It’s more of a timeless character-focused narrative. We don’t go super-deep into the really sad side of war, to see civilian casualties and all those kind of things. I think it’s more about the growth of the characters. It is sort of romanticised for a war game – we’re not going into the extremes of how war can really be.”
Another surprising aspect of Remedy’s involvement with the project is that the studio has embraced firstperson perspective for the first time. After this, might we see an FPS from Remedy itself? “That’s a good question,” says Remedy’s head of communications, Thomas Puha. “We spent a lot of time on the firstperson animations early on, and
I think it’s been done well. How does the gun look? How does it feel? If we don’t get that feel right then, you know, that’s everything in an FPS. All of us play a lot of firstperson shooters, and it is about how it feels when you aim and get that shot off. That was supercritical. It’s stating the obvious but it’s hard to get that stuff right.”
“Never say never,” laughs Taipalvesi. “Because we’ve spent a lot of time crafting all the tools and tech to do this firstperson game, and if you think of all the differences between third and firstperson, like environment scaling and everything else, now that we have built this toolbox, why not find other uses for it?”
A full Remedy FPS is a tantalising notion: for now, we’re curious to see just how Crossfire X’s singleplayer campaign is going to stand out against those in similarly inclined war-asentertainment shooters. On this scant early evidence, it seems war still never changes.
The team have had to wrestle several apparent contradictions into submission