Review: Crossfire (Xbox Live Indie)
The second Xbox Live Indie Games release from radiangames, Crossfire, takes the familiar Space Invaders formula and adds a pretty cool twist to it. With the click of a trigger button, your ship will jump from the bottom of the screen to top, or vice versa, zipping past anything in between. Since the enemy ships tend to fire in curtains of bullets, you’ll need to jump between the two sides of the screens and attack from behind, as any kind of head-on attack is sure to end up with disastrous results.
It’s an addictive gameplay mechanic and there is a nice variety of enemy behaviors that work around it. Basic enemy ships fire in one direction in packs and periodically change firing directions, while other ships deflect your fire if attacked from the front. Still others explode into a spread of bullets when destroyed. And while each of these may easily be dealt with individually, the real fun comes when dealing with different enemy ships simultaneously.
Each enemy ship destroyed drops ammo gems, which fuel a faster and more powerful secondary shot. Bonus ships that fly across the top or bottom of the screen drop bonus items if destroyed (such as one that slows down the enemy ships temporarily). And every few levels, you can procure an item to give a temporary boost in power or speed.
The standard game lasts fifty waves and can be played solo or co-op (locally). The game feels a bit unbalanced, unfortunately. You should be able to blaze through the first twenty, maybe thirty waves pretty easily after a game or two to warm up, but the last areas start to get a bit crazy, typically with levels involving the ships that protect surrounding ships. But if you make it through, a few extra modes can be unlocked, including a harder version of the main fifty wave game and a (seemingly) endless mode made of shifting challenge waves.
Visually, the game looks a lot of Geometry Wars 2, with glowing, brightly colored neon vector-like graphics and numerous particles flying every which way on the screen. It’s a nice look that really perfectly blends the old-school gameplay with new-school graphical prowess. On the other hand, the particles effects might be a bit (and I’m being kind here) overused. In the later levels, the effect starts to cloud areas of the screen, making it extremely difficult to tell where incoming fire is, especially with how hectic the later waves can get.
The soundtrack features a single dance/trance tune over the main game, plus a few little tunes for menus, etc. The music isn’t quite as strong as JoyJoy’s, but it still works great in the game.
Crossfire is a very strong follow-up to JoyJoy. It feels tighter and more focused in a lot of ways and it takes on a familiar formula that isn’t oversaturated in the downloadable game market (yet, haha). On the flip side, being a few months apart from their previous game, there are also a few spots that could have maybe been more polished (like an extra song or two and some fine-tuning to the difficultly of the end game). But it’s a wonderful game that shines above a lot of the dreck that ends up on Xbox Live Indie Games. In a lot of ways, it feels like a game that would have been an early member of the Xbox Live Arcade lineup, before the recent shift to “bigger” games (and more first/third person shooters, which the 360 was in “dire” need of).
