But someone who played mid-2000s Call of Duty games as a teen might find CrossfireX to be a welcome blast from the past, in the same way that indie games like Shovel Knight successfully play on my 2D nostalgia. Is this Modern Warfare style of set piece-driven linear action games “old school” at this point? To me, it still feels modern (my sense of time is absolutely busted at this point and 2007 still feels like it was five years ago). So once again, I find myself asking: At what point does a game become retro? Downgrade the visuals and you might mistake it for a long-lost 2007 shooter.
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It all feels like a bit of a throwback for those who grew up with a PS3 instead of an NES. It was a thrilling sequence that reminded me of Call of Duty’s best missions. Then I was swapping between both perspectives, with the first character running down the building to escape and the sniper shooting off incoming enemies. I sniped my own captor and shot the cuffs off my character. Suddenly, I switched over to a sniper on top of a building across from him. At the end of Chapter 1 in Operation Catalyst, my character was captured and tied to a chair. CrossfireX even has players swapping between characters in sequences.
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Like that game, there’s a series of seemingly interconnected storylines happening between the two campaigns. “Modern Warfare” is a fitting term, because the snippets I played remind me of shooters like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Operation Catalyst is more standard 2000s military game fare, with a soldier shooting his way through dilapidated buildings, while Spectre leans more into modern warfare, complete with pesky drones to shoot down. There’s a vague global conflict, a squad of indistinguishable tough guys, and some stilted voice-over that provides exposition and internal monologue in equal measure. The campaign feels pulled out of the mid-2000s, before games like The Last of Us set the template for modern game storytelling. That’s where the word “retro” really began to worm its way into my head. In my demo, I was able to play Chapter 1 of Operation Catalyst and up to Chapter 3 of Operation Spectre. The story is split up into two separate campaigns, both of which were developed by Control studio Remedy Entertainment. I’ve done this thousands of times at this point, but I still get satisfaction from popping headshots, just like I’ll always have fun playing a new 2D Mario game (though one is a little more violent, admittedly). As I wiped out waves of vague bad guys by shooting explosive barrels, I thought about how timeless the experience felt. Other than that little trick, gunplay feels classical. Instead, I could always shoot first and ask questions later. I never felt like I had to duck behind cover to wait out gunfire.
Despite slowing time, it actually keeps the game’s pace up. When pressing the right bumper, time slows down, allowing players to take out waves of enemies with ease. The main thing that sets it apart from other shooters is its concentration system. Players shoot guns, toss grenades, and sneak up on enemies to get a quick melee knife kill. Classical shooterĬrossfireX is a fairly traditional first-person shooter. That makes it feel like a “retro” experience, depending on what era of games you grew up in.
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As I played, I was brought back to the mid-2000s era where games were still figuring out how to break the rules of digital storytelling. Fitbit Versa 3ĬrossfireX is a brand new game, but the slice of its campaign I played still feels distinctly 2007.