Crossfire Legion is set in the world imagined by the software house Smilegate in 2007 with Crossfire, the most successful free-to-play online shooter ever in the Asian market. Unfortunately, this strategic iteration of the franchise has had a difficult pre-launch period.
It is difficult to say what was the main cause: in the West its name is far from high-sounding and Remedy’s Crossfire X is questionable (here our review of Crossfire X) it certainly didn’t help to give prestige to the saga. In any case, between the meager fanbase and the presence of questionable grinding mechanics, the popularity of the strategic never took off during the early access phase. In its definitive version, in any case, Crossfire Legion arrives with all units ready for use for online mode and a single player campaign divided into four acts. We have tried it and we are ready to tell you about it in detail.
A campaign without bite
First of all, wanting to familiarize ourselves with the title, we immediately dived into the main campaign, finding ourselves catapulted into the gameplay with very little information on the commands and actions available to us.
Even the narrative premises seemed confused to us: in the not too distant future, three factions are fighting for global domination with advanced military technologies. We are talking about Global Risk, mercenaries in the service of established power, then the Black List, a group at open war with Global Risk and finally New Horizons, an independent faction driven by the desire to transcend human limitations thanks to technological advances. In the four acts that make up the story we will be able to use all three groups, also shedding light on the characters at the head of the respective factions. Unfortunately, however, the background of the conflict is taken almost for granted, without any introduction related to the motivations of the organizations and without a clear exposition of the events narrated. In other words, those who are not familiar with the franchise will have great difficulty understanding the developments of the plot. As if that weren’t enough, the characters they turned out to be quite one-dimensionala factor that has had a negative impact on a story that already knows how to intrigue very little.
The 15-assignment single player campaign, which kept us busy for 7 hours, in short, does not represent the central component of the package. Due to their brevity, the missions could not accommodate the story of sufficiently articulated events, and they did not even allow the fundamental elements to be better exposed to effectively command the multitude of units present on the screen.
The actual tutorial, during the first two missions, mainly teaches us how to select the troops and give them the right orders, but it would have been infinitely more useful to know how to assign units to command groupskeyboard shortcuts to manage team skills or how to build effective strategies.
All the elements that need to be mastered to play multiplayer are left to the player’s experimentation, which he finds himself having to support blitzkrieg battlesso fast that it is even difficult to select the desired unit and activate its talents before the conclusion of the battle.
Story of wasted potential
Crossfire Legion draws heavily on some classics of real-time strategy, to the point of reproposing several elements of the gameplay almost unchanged. Each game revolves around the collection of two resourcesto be accumulated in our main base: “materials” and “fuel” are generic enough names to avoid any kind of reference to Starcraft minerals and vespene, were it not for the building in which they will be stored, the Logistics Depot which brings to mind the Supply Depot from the Blizzard saga.
Thanks to the accumulated resources we can build foundationscomplete with defensive structures and buildings for the creation of large armies useful for achievement of strategic objectives on the game map. Even the skills of the units at our disposal are reminiscent of others that veterans of the genre will recognize without difficulty, and the game suggests using them to get the better of specific opponents, in a rather poor “rock, paper and scissors” system. Despite these tips, it seemed to us that it was the simple numbers that were the determining factor of the battles. Throwing units in profusion up to completely destroying the enemy base, we will always have the better of the contender, which flattens the tactical component of pruduction quite a bit. There are numerous examples of titles that, while not innovating, have been able to create skilful blends of mechanics already seen and peculiar stylistic elements but unfortunately this is not the case with Crossfire Legion.
The moment the battles begin, is the one in which Legion offers its best: endless storms of bullets and energy beams, spectacular explosions and animations detailed enough to make us forget for a moment how quickly it will all end. A real pity, because looking closely, some more inspired flashes can be glimpsed in the fighting style of the militiaor in the creation of the bases.
The rosters of the three factions include, in fact, approximately twenty units, bringing the total to almost about sixty unique models distributed among the three sides. The hyper-technological mechas and armored troops of the New Horizon, which will dominate the battlefield thanks to their imposing size, the assault vehicles of the Black List, which will exploit their agility for hit and run guerrilla actions, up to the most classic retrofuturistic designs of the Global Risk units: in short, the efforts made to differentiate the military groups are evident and appreciable.
Even the creation of the bases, as mentioned above, is not lacking in character. When we build a structure, in fact, it will automatically consist of a container launched from an aircraft. Once built, each building can be improved, with moving parts that with detailed animations will give shape to unique visual solutions for each building. With these updates, we will be able to recruit new types of units and give troops passive bonuses, such as armor or increased fire range. Not to mention the artistic direction and technical optimization, which seemed to us to be very respectable: nothing qualitatively surprising, mind you, yet both the animated kinematics and the granite frame rate work properly even in the most chaotic phases.
The hard truth
Another problem of Legion is also linked to its ambitions: it presented itself to the public with the intention of representing the new, great, competitive experience in the RTS field. For this reason, to accompany the single-player campaign, BlackBird Interactive has set up an online system formed by five modes. Each differs in rules and objectives, such as the conquest of the whole map or the defense of strategic areas, going from “all against all” skirmishes up to cooperative matches. If we add a good number of maps to this variety, eight to be precise, as well as the possibility of create new ones using the editorit is evident that a lot of good will has been poured into the development phase.
Unfortunately, however, from last May until the time of writing the review we have gone from a few hundred players to a number of active users that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. In essence, the only mode that we were able to test consistently, outside of the main campaign, was the cooperative component, played together with bots. We are very sorry not to have been able to organize sessions with other real players, given the great increase in pleasure and longevity that online could have given to this strategy.
Basically, the campaign mode, which was supposed to act essentially as a tutorial to familiarize yourself with the basics of the experience, it has become the main playful column of the title. So here is that, net of a whole series of attentions on the scenic front and some good ideas, the problems afflicting the single player sector they gained even more weight.
