Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire is something of a milestone. It represents the headlong collision of two longstanding truisms in gaming: “Launch titles suck,” and “Gundam games suck.” In Crossfire, a shambling mutant horror has risen from the primordial ooze of the Playstation 3’s launch lineup.

You’ve got to win it in the…

Crossfire loosely follows the formula pioneered by Mobile Suit Gundam: Federation vs. Zeon on the PS2. You choose either the Earth Federation or the Zeon side and play through the events of the first Gundam TV series. For Crossfire, you’re sent to Southeast Asia, where you’ll be safely away from the main operations of the One Year War, and you mostly participate in side-story style sorties consisting of strike raids and search-and-destroy missions.

You start with nothing and must buy new mechs and pilots with points earned in missions. Missions are dreary and repetitive affairs, consisting almost entirely of “kill everything that isn’t your wingman,” with occasional objectives requiring you to knock a building over after you kill everything that isn’t your wingman.

Between outings you navigate a clunky and molasses-slow series of nesting menus to order new troops, upgrade existing mechs, and check your mission schedule. It would be nice to skip this step, but since any damage to your mobile suits must be repaired before you can take them out on a new mission, you’ll either need to build up a fairly large fleet or simply get used to tapping X a lot before getting back to the action.

Concerning forestry and water tension

Not that the action is an improvement on your situation. Crossfire’s visuals are so bad it’s almost an achievement. Muddy, minimal-detail textures cling to low-polygon-count environments like last-gen barnacles. Many of the stages you play in would be perfectly at home in a PSone Armored Core game. Rudimentary trees and bridges can be destroyed, but promptly disappear into the ether.

Some of the “effects” in the game are downright laughable. Land a mech in the water and it doesn’t ripple so much as waver up and down like a sheet of fabric. As an added bonus, it often clips through nearby ground several feet away.

The mobile suits themselves look decent, with lots of detail in their construction and nice location-specific damage effects. They can lose limbs, weapons, shields, and even their heads. It’s hard to appreciate them for very long, though, since most of your time will be spent trying to get your chosen metal warrior to lug itself around the painfully small battlefield in a manner somewhat resembling your controller input.

Universally Terrible Century 0079

Crossfire wouldn’t pass muster as a PS2 game, let alone a PS3 launch title. Onlookers will probably mistake it for a PS2 game at first glance. It’s not like we expected a Gundam game to set the world on fire, but even for a Gundam title, Crossfire is a special kind of bad. Should you get your hands on a PS3, avoid this at all costs. It’s shovelware of the highest order, and if you buy it, you’re part of the problem.

Article by: Matt Keil
Video produced by: Matt Keil