Fast and Furious Crossroads - Review

The Fast and the Furious series might have changed from a b-grade action/heist movie when it first released, of course we are talking about the new one, not the 1954 movie of the same name. Over the years, it has shifted locations and countries, increased the sceptical by a factor of 100 and there is seemingly no end in sight, except when it comes to video games. Over the years there have been a few attempts at the games, but none seemed to capture the same lightning in a bottle effect that the movies did and now with Crossroads, the question is, did they cross the finish line, or did it boost to soon?

The simple answer is they failed and they somehow managed to do it, despite the number of talented folks working on it. Crossroads is a game that tells an original story, set in the same universe and features some of the same characters a few new ones and much like the movies, has you bouncing all around the globe, taking various cars out for a spin. While the tutorial mission and I use that term loosely, has you playing as the growler Dom Toretto, as he and Letty, attempt to take out a bad guy, who is driving a snowmobile/tank hybrid. Doing so, they split off into different directions, in order to take down the Tadakhul an ancient order of highway men, which is exactly how we met Dom and Letty in the first place. With that sorted, you are placed into the driver’s seat of Vienna Cole and her friend Cam, both brought to life by Sonequa Martin-Green and Asia Kate Dillon respectively. The new characters are attempting to eek out a life for themselves in Barcelona, which turns out is exact where Letty is headed, and they somehow stumble into the midst of a Tadakhul operation.

The problem is a simple one, there is no reason to care about the new characters, given by the time the first mission is done, they have gone through a few different types of emotions, causing the details to fall apart. Now while in movies, a fast-paced story might be the order of the day, in video games, there is the element of time, so having more dissection of a characters backstory, or their current motivations should be easily achieved, but here it is not. That is not to say that the story does not push characters forward. Cam starts out as a fairly generic person, but with small throwaway lines here and there, you start to learn more about them, even Vienna, has more story shown, the problem is, they put hers in, during breaks of high speed driving, which is when you don’t want to do that. By the time, the third member of the movie cast arrives, Tyrese Gibson, I was done with the new crew and happy to just push on and thankfully, the game was going to let me.

When you play the single player story, be prepared for two things, frustration and no rest, because the game lives up to its name in two ways, it is very fast in make you furious and very fast in the story department. The entire pacing of the game is a mess, the opening city is Barcelona, but it is not an open world, meaning that you don’t get any time to just drive around and explore, in fact if you even attempt to head off the route the game is expecting you to follow, it throws up giant warnings to tell you that you are leaving the play zone. That is the kind of thing you get in Battlefield, when you hit the edge of the maps that are kilometres in width, not three cars away from the street you are driving on. The problem with this, apart from it being stupid, is that the game has police chases thrown at you with wild abandon, should you drive to fast, that’s a police chase, smash into cars near a cop, you beat that’s a police chase and the game is fine with dealing them out faster than you can pour out a bucket of M&M’s. Which would be all well and good, until you encounter the mystery boundaries that the game has, but never shows you until you cross them, which is compounded even further, when you see that races and escape missions block you from getting of track, so to speak.

Speaking of tracks, for a game based on a movie series, based on street racing, there is almost none here, there are a few times when the story calls for races and while serviceable, there are things missing, like a map to help show where you are, or even a timer, so you can see how good you were. Sadly though, even they were included, it would not fix the games underlying problem, driving a car in Fast and Furious Crossroads is like driving a car on Ice, not the solid water either, the drug. Handling of any vehicle ranges from manageable at slow speeds, to look ma’ I’m a car sized pinball and very rarely is there anything in between and while slick handling would be ok, given that the game requires you to do some precious driving a lot, it makes for some frustrating and downright rage inducing moments.

Problems with the vehicles also increase when you consider the number of cars, trucks and buses on the roads, which are always densely populated, unless the story calls for them not to be. Something that is a nice touch is that your car, can only receive so much damage, before it is totalled and whatever mission you are on ends in failure. The problem is that your car, or more specifically the game, randomly determines what is considered damage, as there were times I bounced into a car, only to have it fly away and leave me with no damage, but the next time, I lost a chunk of health. This is a problem, not because of its inconsistency with health, but just overall inconsistency with when it wants to detect damage, there times when I would come to an almost dead stop, times when I would drive through and occasionally, I would be launched into the air, like some sort of rocket by a California start up, which usually involved crashing down hard.

Inconsistencies also pilled up with the AI, when in street racers, the AI would rubber band worse than Mario Kart, which is pretty bad already. There were times when I would get a perfect line, only to have the other racers speed up behind me, slingshot around, usually clipping me and then they just sort of sit there in front, waiting for me to stop bouncing of the walls. In normal ‘free drive’ the AI proves to be a real mess, as cars were constantly crashing into each other, I saw countless trucks ‘merge’ into other lanes, even if cars were in the space and even buses were eager to push ahead, ploughing into other vehicles, including cops, without a car in the world. Basically, you have handling that doesn’t want to work at anything above 1km per hour, AI that does whatever it wants at the best of times and collision detection that ranges from out of control to out of phase.

On the presentation side, things are just as messy, most of the characters that are based on actors are right on, Vin Diesel, the previously mentioned new characters played by Sonequa and Asia are spot on. Tyrese and the other newcomer Peter Stormare are also faithful digital recreations, Letty, voiced by Michelle Rodriguez is however very different from her real life look, it does not look bad, just nothing like the actress that portrays the character. The world also suffers from the same thing, the locations the game takes place in, Barcelona, Morocco, New Orleans and beyond, all look close to what they should, but there is something off about each of them. This is not helped by the games atrocious lighting, it ranges from being on, to being on, but only in some parts and then turning off, but only in some parts, before it throws everything on random. While cutscenes were generally exempt from that, seeing the lighting flicker as you attempt to race around was not fun, especially given the frequent incidents with cars.

The audio side, things are ok, the voice work is good, not great, but good, though you can tell there are times when the voice work was recorded in other sessions, some lines feel out of place; they don’t happen all that often, but when they do, they stand out. The cars though sound amazing, at least when you can hear them, the grinding and scrapping noises are quite proficient, especially when you are using items mounted to cars, like rocket launchers and such. The music, I can’t say if it is bad or good, as I can’t recall anything about it, which I suppose leans more towards the bad side of things, but I know I didn’t hate it.

Fast and Furious Crossroads is a game that had potential to be amazing, it had a developer known for their amazing pedigree with car games, the support of one of the world’s largest publishers, one of the world’s largest movie studios and Vin Diesel’s own Tigon Studios. For some reason though, nothing clicks the way it should, characters we know are rarely used, the ones we don’t are forced upon us without any care. The story moves at such a pace, it feels like everything is on fast forward and then when you do get to game, everything wants to work against you. Even die hard, Fast and Furious fans will struggle to find the fun in this one, in fact, it is honestly one family reunion you should pass on.

The Score

3.0

Review code provided by Bandai Namco

The Pros

+Has the feel of one of the movies, with many cars and locations

The Cons

-Just about everything else, AI appears drunk most of the time

-Collision is a random draw each time

-Driving the cars will leave you furious