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Crossfire is going to be a divisive game. The team behind it knows that and they're okay with it. And I've seen a little bit of it now, too. And honestly, I think I'm okay with it, too, because underneath that divisiveness, there is the potential to push the genre forward in a way that very few others are trying to do these days. People are endlessly disappointing. If you're not familiar, you haven't seen the trailer yet, Crossfire is the debut game from That Snow Moon, a studio based here in LA that is made up of a bunch of fresh faces, but also veterans that have worked on franchises like Call of Duty, Uncharted, and God of War, among many, many others. And it is a thirdp person shooter very focused on coverbased
combat that is in the military space which admittedly on paper doesn't sound particularly new or exciting because we're very familiar with that territory. Those games are and have been a dime a dozen but there are a few things happening under the hood that make it a little more interesting. So the main things that they wanted to talk to us about was first narrative. Now, the military space when it comes to narrative has kind of gone one way, which is the explosive, over-the-top nature of basically superhero movies. Everything that is happening in games like Call of Duty is large. It is grand. Is massive things happening on a global scale. And that's
not to say this game doesn't have that, but the core of the story is about the two central characters. They are two military types from different walks of life in pretty much every way. One of them was a gun for hire. The other one I think is a more of a traditional military pathway. One of them is all about progress. The other one is more about following orders and sticking to the straight and narrow. And the other things are kind of like their perspectives differ. Their ethos on life differs and the way they approach things differ. They've both been thrust together in this horrible scenario where the only way they're going to make it through it is if they come together and find middle ground and points of
reconciliation. And the only way to do that is to see the world through each other's perspective and learn about each other and build that friendliness and that familiarity so that when they are taking on challenges, they feel like they have each other's back. Admittedly, again, doesn't sound crazy exciting, but what I did take away from it is it doesn't feel like it's the end of the world scenario. It no doubt will reach that point, but I felt really grounded when I saw what was happening. The characters are acted pretty well and they felt very natural and they seemed like they had a nice banter back and forth between them. It feels like it has the makings of a story that could stick
with you if they can do the characters right and also the story around it. There's some sci-fi things happening that they weren't willing to delve too deep into, but there's a little more to that story than initially meets the eye. The core thing, however, is the team wants to use the game play to reinforce the nature of the story. Again, sounds like familiar territory, but the way it manifests in this game is that the team wants you to feel how those characters feel when they are in those scenarios. Most third person shooter games, you know exactly what is going to happen at any point. And even when the game is telling you the end of the world is upon us, you can kind of dillydally mess
around. And also, you're given this kind of empowerment which takes away kind of the tension. The stakes aren't always as palpable when you're being told one thing, but your capabilities far exceed any sort of challenges that are being presented to you. This is on the complete opposite spectrum. This game is incredibly difficult. On a baseline, guns firing at you, it was a hail of bullets that I was watching. The person playing it, obviously, dozens and dozens of hours, no doubt, logged in that game. They designed it and developed it, so they should know it inside out. But when they took the controller and started playing it live in front of us, it looked like a novice was playing that
game. And that's kind of the point. That's what they want. They don't want the game to feel easy. They want you to go through a grueling process, a life ordeath situation time after time. So that when you are in those situations, you are a mirror of what the characters on screen are going through. So that all the emotions that you imagine they would be feeling, you would be feeling. And ultimately that brings you closer to the characters on screen and gives that story more gravitas. It also is, again, I'm the From Software guy, so I'm going to evoke Dark Souls, but that sense of accomplishment, the sense of like breathing out and the endorphin rush that you get from completing a particularly difficult challenge is also something they're
aspiring to. So, that is a kind of like the story of the game. These two characters kind of finding their way together. So, as I said, it's a third person coverbased game, but what's interesting about it is it kind of breaks all the common rules and the language we know of those types of games. So, you think about a third person coverbased shooter, and I imagine you're thinking of Gears of War. That is the protottypical third person shooter. And the way that game is designed and played is largely how most thirdperson shooters have played since that game. You kind of approach an arena and immediately you identify it as a place that's going to be littered with enemies and you'll have to fight waves of them
until you're good and then you can go on to the next one. That's exactly what happens in most of those games. You'll see waste high items in placed around these environments and you know once I get close enough I hit a button I will slide into cover. I'm stuck to that cover. I can move left and right maybe flip between different cover points. If I want to attack the enemy, I can pop up and shoot or I can blindfire over. Those are the fundamentals of pretty much every third person shooter. However, in this game, they kind of throw all that out. Firstly, you go into these environments and none of it looks or feels like it's constructed as a place for a bunch of people to shoot at each other and also hide behind things.
There's no obvious cover points. There's no, you know, specifically exploding barrels. What I we were seeing was just a mountainous rocky area that looked very natural. If you took a still of the game, it would just look like something you would see on like National Geographic or something like that. But actually, that is the environment. They want to create realistic environments because the tech that they're running underneath it allows those environments to become the cover you need and also to become the obstacles you need to navigate if you're going to defeat the enemy. So, the actual technology, it's this traversal system that has a granularity to it that they believe is innovative. I certainly haven't seen
anything to that degree. The closest I've seen to it is Metal Gear Solid 5 where Snake you can see the transition from standing to crouching to laying down to rolling over to on your back to aiming while on your back. The kind of fluidity that Snake has in that it's all dictated and created by smooth animations. In this game, the team has said that they've basically created hundreds of thousands of animations so that no matter where you point your stick and guide the character to how they react and respond to the environment and also navigate that environment looks natural. It looks tactical. It looks strategic. It isn't just a dude running over something or flipping over a piece of cover. There's actual level of nuance to the way you
move that means that you can kind of get into cracks and crevices and kind of move in a way that I haven't seen video game characters move in a while. You know the bit in the Division trailer where someone is like sliding along the camera the car and then like closes the door and everyone went mental for that. Is that taken to the furthest extreme where you don't just like run from point to point? the characters are kind of like gingerely shuffling, trying to keep their body down while also kind of moving towards where they want to go. Sometimes they're not on their feet. They're kind of like using their arms to pull themselves across. You'll find like two these two, you know, rocks that are
close together, but there's like a small gap in between and instead of normal game, you go around it, you can just push through and the character will like put their hand on there, put a foot over and like move between it. It's not all just for show though because you can imagine that every point that you're now interacting with is something that you can now use in combat scenarios. Both you can and the enemy can. So when you play the game, the kind of loop that the game has that it wants you to kind of engage with as a way to kind of force you to understand how the game is playing is you start off with stealth.
Stealth is the best way to approach it and that kind of slow methodical movement system. It looks particularly effective in that scenario. At one point, it just looked like a straightup stealth game where the character was moving around the area, kind of like skirting around the perimeter, getting close, finding enemies who were not paying attention, taking them out quietly, and thinning the herd out. However, when the shots were fired and everything popped off, it was not choreographed. It was chaos. It was It didn't feel like a fun scripted video game moment. It felt like everyone saw this person and is now everyone is just
firing at the same time and they're moving around to try and get the jump on you. That level of situational awareness that you need to have is not something I've seen as a demand in many other third person shooter games. It's almost to the point where it's probably going to be not fun for a lot of people, but that again is what the studio is going for. They want a grounded, gritty, highle lethality game. The kind of experience you'd have playing an extraction shooter or any other sort of military sim. They want that feeling of tension, but in a narrative-driven singleplayer shooter, and it definitely feels like they've gone a lot of the way there. The scenarios in which they were moving through, the person playing the
game, who no doubt has dozens of hours in it, died like three times. And it wasn't like a scripted, oho, I died. It was like, no, this person was struggling. There were points where they took a turn and even in my mind I was like, that's a bad turn. You cannot do that. Or they would throw a grenade at a point where I was like, why are you doing this? And it was almost instant that a mistake led to just the most brutal, brutal kind of reaction from the enemies around you. So, it was like a lot of desperately moving between these environments, getting low, getting high, trying to jump over anywhere that will get you some clearing space so you can quickly heal, taking out some enemies
where you can, grabbing whatever items they have to kind of replenish your plates or grab some armor or take their gun. It was very much a on the on death's door kind of tension to it. And that is a thing that I'm not sure how people are going to respond to. Obviously, games can be hard. The interesting thing about this game is the genre itself is very inviting to a broader mass of people. Like the third person shooter genre, especially in the military world, is the kind of game that everyone plays. You probably know 10 people in your life that love those kind of games. They play them every day. You know, it's the part of their routine. So, it has the appeal of a easy to pick up. I'm gonna have fun with this type of
game, popcorn shooter, and you know, that'll be that. What they'll get, however, is a very punishing, highly strategic shooter that demands way more of them than any other game they probably play. And will probably give them the feeling of fun, much less than any other game that they've played. And because of that, I'm really interested to see whether they're able to achieve their objectives. Because if you think about it, it's all well and good having this kind of objective of pushing traversal forward, kind of having this story that is going to be memorable and leave a mark on players, story that you connect with the characters and the things that are happening to them. But if your game is so tricky, divisive that
people can't make it over the first hump, they might not see that. And the impact of that, those two innovations or those things that you're going for might not be felt. The way I think of it is coverbased games. Everyone knows and loves Gears of War. That is probably what they're trying to make happen. The influence of Gears of War is probably what they're trying to make happen. That is a game that changed the way that third person shooters are designed even to this day. Gears of War is the objective. But before that game, a lot of people will tell you Kill Switch is the game that kind of really made that first big step forward for coverbased shooting. The question then
becomes, is this going to be a kill switch or is this going to be a Gears of War? Is this the game that really will push the genre forward or is this the game that will inspire the game that will push the genre forward? It's hard to say either way. What I can say is it's a very interesting, fascinating game. I'm not sure how it's going to go down. It's clear the team behind it have ambitions. This is the game that they want to make and it is exactly the thing that they've been trying to make. Whether it lands or not, it's going to be an interesting story either way.
