Fast & Furious Crossroads (Xbox One)
The Fast & Furious series of films is about more than just fast cars, some pretty incredible stunts turning car chases into one-of-a-kind exciting sequences that often use practical effects for extraordinary scenes. To turn Fast & Furious into a plain driving game would miss what sets the film franchise apart, but luckily experienced racing game developer Slightly Mad Studios made sure Fast & Furious Crossroads would capture that element of the movies, sometimes with levels inspired by specific movie scenes and others concocted just for their own story. Unfortunately, not everything comes together quite so cohesively that it feels like a proper driving game experience.
Fast & Furious Crossroads tells an original story within the film’s universe, utilizing familiar characters and new ones for its short narrative. Lifelong friends Vienna and Cam are working on cars in the city of Barcelona to escape their past when they’re pulled into conflict with a global criminal organization known as Tadakhul. Tadakhul’s history goes all the way back to the days of highway robbery and they have their hands in some world-threatening activities, but Vienna ends up pulled in mostly because of a desire to avenge her boyfriend Sebastian who couldn’t pay his debts to them and suffered the price for it. The activities of Vienna and Cam put them on the same path as a few characters from the films, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, and Tyrese Gibson reprising their roles as Dom, Letty, and Roman respectively. Roman in particularly brings some much-needed energy to the later half of the adventure with his more comedic lines and strong energy compared to characters like Vienna who takes things a bit too seriously and Cam who can sometimes bounce too much between seriousness and wise-cracking in a short span, but there is enough to the scenes to give the plot some stakes and justify some unique locations and high stakes for a globe-trotting adventure.
The story is definitely at its best when it comes to providing somewhat plausible reasons for absurd scenarios, the game happy to indulge in over the top action but still trying to root it in legitimate work to stop a threatening villain organization. At different points in the story you’ll find yourself outracing a rockslide, driving along a train you’re firing upon, and even dragging a massive device behind you like a wrecking ball you can smash pursuing cars with. These sequences are always visually impressive and do a good deal to sell the concept at play even when it’s ridiculous or impossible and it provides plenty of memorable moments in between more standard racing or driving jobs, but they do hit on similar problems to the more standard missions. Fast & Furious Crossroads isn’t always the best at objective structuring, so while it has nice looking cars and spectacular stunts, you’ll often be participating in them by doing things like driving in a straight line until the moment comes where you can sideswipe a vehicle or use a device briefly before the target takes a little damage, pulls ahead, and you keep going forward waiting for that moment you’re in range again. Some objectives will at least give you more complex roads to weave around as you pursue a target, but whether it’s a high octane chase to catch up with a tank-like hovercraft or simply trying to knock a delivery truck off the road, they’ll often boil down to driving forward until your small window emerges where you can do something.
There are definitely some mission types that are even weaker than this though, like ones where you need to tail a car by not driving too fast or furiously. These slower moments will sometimes be used to try and give characters time to speak outside of cutcenes at least so you get to know them a bit better and the plot is serviceable fare for an action movie inspired adventure, but there are many times a mission objective feels less like it’s testing you and more like you’re just putting in the time not screwing up. Some racing and more aggressive driving segments exist, although some like the relay race are odd since restarting from the pause menu will start you at the last relay of the race you played with all the other racers beside you while others like the New Orleans race set you back to the beginning of the two lap challenge. Similarly, some race or driving tests feel a bad fit for your wide handbrake drifting while others offer the needed road space for more advanced maneuvers. Your car can take jumps and crash through objects without much trouble but in tight city streets it’s difficult to pull off some hairpin turns, although the New Orleans race actually spaces things well and is perhaps the best bit of competitive driving you’ll find in the game. Nitro is almost always a slowly rebuilding option to use with your car, letting you gain some speed to either make up for some bumps into barriers or shorten those missions that are just about catching up with a target over and over.
While missions will sometimes have you swapping between drivers on the fly, usually its because they’re outfitted with one useful weapon and the action ends up a little centralized because of the limits on a car’s offensive capabilities. Every car can suddenly lurch left or right as an attack so you can always bully enemy cars in some form, but then you’ll have something like the harpoon that pulls them in so you can bump them or the oil slick that doesn’t upset enemy drivers as reliably as you might expect. There are times you’re pursued by the cops and need to shake them, although different missions have different requirements so sometimes you need to avoid killing them but it’s hard to determine your limits since sometimes they can survive their car blowing up when you ram it hard enough to send it airborne. Your allies can also die while they’re fighting enemy cars on their own and lead to an immediate loss, but since interaction is often fairly basic between you and enemies you at least aren’t going to feel like you can’t get back to the point where you lost on a retry. A lot of extreme stunts and situations end up trying to make up for the actual activities you’re involved in not being too engaging, but beyond the drifting issues you will at least find your car pretty responsive and the weapons easy enough to weave into the action despite their limited nature.
Fast & Furious Crossroads has a fairly short campaign, although it at least knows to keep cranking up the dial on intense action setpieces once it has started to get going a bit. The multiplayer is a bit different though, the game requiring a full set of nine players for online play to be possible. In multiplayer you will be divided into teams of three, one representing the heroes like Dom and Vienna, another the Tadakhul villains, and a third team being made up of cops. Depending on the level you end up in the goal will be different for the heroes and villains, many of the goals being pretty close to story missions like one where the device needs to be dragged to safety through the docks. Villains will have goals like needing to protect a hovercraft while the Hero team is trying to destroy it and there’s a wider range of customizable weapons and car choices to pull from in multiplayer, but the cops are given a bit simpler goal in trying to arrest everyone. This manifests mostly as just damaging and slowing down the other cars often enough to accumulate a few stars under their names, players still able to play if they’re busted so it’s more about being a constant source of interference while the other two groups are either protecting or assaulting an objective. Since you will still often ended up doing a lot of chasing and the side attacks are going to be your best option for hurting other players at times it can feel fairly plain like the story mode or devolve into a lot of crashing as a pileup ends up hard to break away from, but even getting a group together for a weak driving game like this now would end up not worth the fairly bland car battling on offer.
THE VERDICT: Fast & Furious Crossroads has its bombastic moments of visual spectacle and high speed driving that click, but then the actuality of facing off with some over the top danger boils down to driving up to it over and over to do a simple attack while missions that actually test driving prowess are rare or toss in some annoyances to undermine their thrill. A decent but run of the mill action plot strings the story missions and conceptually exciting setpieces together well enough but the multiplayer suffers because of the limited combat options and goals that devolve to ramming chaos most of the time.
And so, I give Fast & Furious Crossroads for Xbox One…
A BAD rating. Funnily enough, the game hewing towards the incredible vehicle action of the films with its often visually spectacular locations and situations would have made this perhaps a fairly entertaining movie, but getting behind the wheel of these high end vehicles ends up depressingly mundane. Holding down the gas until you’re close enough to bump the enemy vehicle ends up too drawn out even when that vehicle happens to be some crazy war machine, and even when you turn your weapons on other players in the Online Ops they’re often just going to lead to people lurching around as the attacks are either strong enough to wipe someone out or annoyingly disruptive like the harpoon or hack that slow you down. Too many missions are just about catching up with things to pester them both in single player and multiplayer, but when you can find some moments to actually race other cars or a clock, the feeling of speed and some of the area layouts do briefly show the driving had potential. If the game could keep you constantly active and engaged during the over the top moments like with smaller guns to harass foes with then maybe you wouldn’t feel like you’re just waiting for your car to get up to the speed needed to finally do something to make progress, but you’re given too much time for the conceptual excitement of a crazy situation to wear off and you start to wish the game was actually challenging you with something that looks like it would be intense to take on but ends up less trying than competing in a standard race.
Fast & Furious Crossroads also had a few little visual glitches like the world not immediately loading in at mission start, a game crash or two, and some moments where the on screen indicators would just reappear and disappear without clear reasoning for their disappearance, but those little hiccups aren’t what really drags this driving game down. Rather than furious you’ll sometimes be asked to play it safe and when you are let go you’re not given the most interesting attack options, and that speed that can also be underplayed at times ends up being too important as you’re catching up with things too often that already have artificial speed boosts so they’re faster than you to prevent a mission ending too early. It could have tried to make more moments where the driving was allowed to be tested in interesting ways or the combat options could have been expanded to make car combat more involved and consistent, but Fast & Furious Crossroads lets its visuals do too much of the work rather than making participating in the over the top action as exciting as it looks.