Cross Fire Beta Impressions

Competence. It’s something that's often lacking in free-to-play-games: maybe the game is buggy or poorly balanced, maybe the networking code sucks or you cant find a hosted match. But, Cross Fire is surprisingly free of those issues. For the many who don't know this title, Cross Fire is a multi-player, team-based, first person shooter currently in open beta. Its one of the anonymous many online only imported titles from the far east. You run around urban environments, planting and defusing bombs, shooting other people (bloodlessly), and in general reenacting the original Counter Strike mod. It’s done well, it’s technically sound, and it even tries to mix things up a bit. I like this sort of game. There's teamwork, animosity, and the good old headshot. The question is: does Cross Fire do enough to differentiate itself from its many, many team-based predecessors?

The story is non-existent. Both teams are composed of mercenaries working for unnamed third parties, one more evil than the other, but they both kill for money. I usually like moral ambiguity in games, but the fact that in Counter Strike you have Terrorists on one side and Counter Terrorists on the other, somehow adds gravity to the situation. That's part of the fun, isn't it? You end up feeling that Cross Fire is missing soul, and I've got a gut feeling someone’s public relations department is responsible. Nobody wants their kids playing as terrorists, and blood could offend a certain type of backseat gamer.

The controls and game play are going to be familiar to any gaming veteran. You move using the "WASD" combo, press "E" to defuse bombs, and so on down the line. The game play consists of the normal modes: Team Death Match, Search and Destroy (defuse the bomb), and Elimination, as well as a creative new mode: Ghost Match. Ghost matches pit a team of visible mercenaries against invisible ones, and it’s actually pretty good fun. Sadly, Ghost mode is not very popular. Another genre standard, buying weapons and gear between rounds at an in-game shop, is Cross Fire's bread and butter. The currency is earned by performance in game and through cold, hard cash in real life, but I haven't spent a buck and don't feel disadvantaged. I've actually started looking forward to that hard-earned semi-automatic machine gun coming my way. And of course seeing the word "Revenge!" flash across the screen when you've avenged yourself upon a previous foe is a very nice touch.

The graphics are satisfactory. Nothing exciting here; the game looks a lot like the forgotten Counter Strike: Zero Release, but rendered on modern hardware. In-game characters are familiar too, the movement animations decent, and old-fashioned pre-animated deaths make an appearance, rather than the physics-backed rag dolls we now take for granted. Cross Fire is so involving that after a few rounds you forget it's graphically dated. The sound is similarly standard, guns sounds like guns, grenades go boom, and your heart beats when you take damage.

As you play, you start to realize Cross Fire is a game designed by the book. Everything from sound to controls and game play are only slightly different from the endless stream of Counter Strike clones. It mostly follows the almost textbook standards of the genre. That said; let’s remember that this is not the finished product. This is an open beta, and this reviewer did not fund the usual shortcomings common in most open betas. Everything about the game is at least “Good,” but very little new ground is broken. For a free-to-play, item-shop supported game, I've been happily surprised. I look forward to seeing what changes and improvements are made as the beta period comes to an end.