Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire
Whatever you do, don't get caught in the Crossfire.
Published: November 28, 2006
If you do adopt this more strategic method of dealing with threats, you'll likely run into one of the game's most egregious errors: despite the illusion of wide-open (and painfully bland) areas, you're boxed in by invisible walls. The enemies? Not so much, so if you're not babysitting wounded targets, they'll often limp off the battlefield while you're dealing with someone else, yet you're held in by some kind of magical barrier. You can snipe them, if they don't go over a ridge, but maybe it wouldn't have been such a bad idea to just wall things in with, y'know, walls if things were going to be so confined.
Making sure you off as many enemies as possible per mission is important, because you're not only graded at the end by time and damage to your unit, but how many enemies you ice. This in turn nets you points, which are used to upgrade your mobile suits (in a whopping three categories; attack, weapons and defense), buy new ones, hire new pilots for them and so on. The more you use a particular MS, the more it'll level up, so it pays to stick with a particular suit, though you'll have to deal with repairs.
Just about anything in between missions takes a few turns. Your mobile suits auto-repair per turn (read: day), and once they're at full health, you can bolt on upgrades. You can also buy new suits and then spend a turn to ship them over to your hangar (same with pilots). Turns are key because missions that pop up are all time-sensitive. Most are voluntary, but taking as many as possible before you hit the end of the year cut-off for the "story" will help strengthen your MSes. It was meant to add a little strategy, but there's little sense of urgency in taking missions.
It's a problem with the whole game: nothing feels speedy. Most of this is due to a framerate that's inexplicably sluggish. Yes, the detail in the mobile suits is fantastic; plenty of angular crags and valleys in the metal bodies make it obvious the models are relatively high-poly, and self-shadowing and modest lighting make the MSes look great. The rest of the world, however, is crap. There's minimal interaction with the levels (yes, buildings blow up in huge chunks, but they quickly disappear), a serious lack of effects, filters, anything beyond the models that make the game feel next-gen. In fact, thanks to the gameplay and crap framerate, it feels decidedly last-gen -- save for the fact that the text and text boxes are so small on a lot of the otherwise blank screens that they're squint-worthy.
I'd be tempted to chalk up the fact that game has dual language support (which is a good thing, as the voice acting isn't terribly solid, though at least it's not painful) to the increased storage of Blu-ray discs, but I noticed after the music, which again isn't horrible, but not especially wonderful either, didn't stop playing when I ejected the disc. In fact, after you start up the game, the entire thing runs off the hard drive if you've committed 4 or so gigs of space to the install.
That's about the only plus Crossfire really has; it loads up fairly quickly, runs entirely from the hard drive, and... well, that's about it. The controls are crap, the storyline nonexistent, and the whole game just feels like a giant slap in the face of Gundam fans who were hoping for an honest-to-goodness next-gen entry into the series. Instead, there's no goodness to find anywhere here. But hey, look at the plus side, at least you now know what the inevitable stinker of the PS3 launch is.
