Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
One of the more intriguing announcements for shooterheads this summer was Crossfire. A new milsim from the minds behind Call of Duty’s last great reinvention—the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot—it boasts an innovative cover mechanic and an evolving emotional connection between the two leads in its campaign. At long last, a new idea in mainstream solo shooting.
Or is it? Crossfire is backed by Smilegate, the publisher made rich by a long-running multiplayer FPS sometimes referred to as Korea’s Counter-Strike. That game’s name is Crossfire, too. And as it turns out, it got a different singleplayer mode just a few years ago. From none other than Remedy, the undisputed industry leaders in Finnish Weird.
That’s right: Sam Lake’s beloved oddballs produced a pair of three-hour FPS campaigns firmly in the Call of Duty model. There’s something perversely intriguing about the prospect—of seeing the studio’s famously leftfield storytelling style constrained by the conventions of a military spectacle shooter. “I’d never been much of a dreamer,” narrates Captain Hall in the opening minutes of the first campaign. “In this work an active imagination can kill you.”
The project was named CrossfireX, and much of it set in a generically unstable country with a vaguely Eastern European flavour. There, you’re thrown between street-to-street firefights, typically with at least one other squaddie—who tells you where to go and who to shoot at. You’re not five minutes in before your first helicopter crash. And in what might generously be considered a tribute to Max Payne, you can activate a simple form of bullet time at comically frequent intervals.
Watching playthroughs of CrossfireX on YouTube, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace—the parodic British TV series in which, the joke goes, episodes were slathered with slo-mo in order to meet their expected running time. “Anything without dialogue was considered for slow motion,” deadpanned Richard Ayoade at the time—his future as a giant in Fable very much ahead of him. I wonder whether, by hitting the bullet time key enough times, you could significantly elongate CrossfireX’s short campaigns too.
There are some smart bits of setpiece design: at one point, your squad fights in the kitchen of a hotel, the bullets pinging off hanging pots and pans, which oscillate wildly under the impact. But then, the one-liners kick in: “This hotel’s getting a shit review from me,” Private Moralez yells. “The service sucks!” From a tonal standpoint, Remedy seems to have decided that its trademark subtlety doesn’t quite belong in this brief sojourn to the Crossfire universe, where the two vying factions are named Global Risk and Black List. Melodrama rules the day, and to some degree it feels as if the job of the campaigns is only to provide moments of badassery—empty posturing that can straightforwardly complement the bombast of multiplayer.
Melodrama rules the day, and to some degree it feels as if the job of the campaigns is only to provide moments of badassery.
What follows that first level, though, is a flash of vintage Remedy. By that point, Captain Hall is unconscious, wandering through a dreamlike rendering of his own house. Wooden train tracks trail across the children’s room, as a radio reporter mutters indistinctly about the risk of terror attacks. An out-of-place photo depicts all of Hall’s squadmates—minus a member who was MIA at the end of the last mission. The stairs from the landing stretch out, Backrooms-style—the wall lamp repeating many more times than it ought to.
“I was back home,” Hall narrates. “My house, my wife Evelyn and the kids. But everything felt off, askew, as if it was somebody else’s memory of my home.” It’s a lot like being in Max Payne’s nightmares—if Max was busy reciting the subtext out loud.
Evelyn’s face appears on a widescreen TV in the living room, speaking with an inappropriate smugness reminiscent of an actor in a toothpaste advert. “We’re pros. We know anybody can catch a bullet, whether it’s one with your name on it or one simply addressed ‘to whom it may concern,'” she smirks. “We know how easy it is to just not come home. You just stay over there, and you miss out on lazy Sunday afternoons, on birthday parties and going to the pet store. I don’t know. Skinned knees, hurricanes, funerals. Everything.”
It’s a genuinely eerie juxtaposition of white-picket fantasy with surrealist horror—evoking both David Lynch and Remedy’s own long history of lighting up the television with arresting imagery. Who could forget in-world Max Payne programming like Address Unknown, Lords and Ladies, Dick Justice, and The Adventures of Captain BaseBallBat-Boy?
Before long, though, you’re back in Azkharzia for a rollercoaster ride in which every corkscrew and hammerhead turn can be anticipated. Losing comrades in the first mission is something of a cliché of the military FPS—Battlefield 6 hit the same note to lacklustre effect just last year. Similarly, in CrossfireX, any genre veteran will quickly suss out what’s really going on; which of the supposed dead are still living, and who on the team is hiding something.
Perhaps with more episodes of CrossfireX under its belt, Remedy might have hit its stride and flexed more creative freedom. But the game was extremely poorly received—and not just on the singleplayer side. Smilegate had intended CrossfireX to be the series’ introduction to consoles, but wound up shutting it down little more than a year after launch. Like a helicopter crash, the disaster took down Remedy’s work with it.
That’s right: the strangest thing about these campaigns is that they no longer exist. Although wholly singleplayer, they were swallowed up in another egregious example of live-service shutdown syndrome. Perhaps they’re no great loss—an unlikely blot on the otherwise excellent record of a studio that has delivered surprising singleplayer stories for decades. Perhaps they served their role in helping to keep said studio afloat during one of the most turbulent periods in games industry history. But I wouldn’t mind if, one day, a feed of CrossfireX appeared on a telly in a Control or Max Payne sequel—suggesting a wider world just beyond our reach.
