Released in 2018, CrossCode follows the adventures of Lea who wakes up on a cargo ship inside of a fictional MMORPG called Crossworlds and is told that she must follow the main quest line of the game in order to regain her memory. From there she meets other players, gets involved with weird villains and uncovers a bunch of schemes and conspiricies which she must get to the bottom of. I dont want to spoil the story too much JUST INCASE there's some massive twat reading this post who has decided that the extremely generic sounding plot sounds interesting but that's the basics. Presentation wise that game has some decently pretty pixel art but the whole thing is done in this faux-anime style and the story writing and dialogue has this weird aura of smugness about it like the devs are constantly jacking off somewhere quietly behind you as you play because they are so fucking pleased with just how "clever" they are.
But whatever, smug and shitty writing aside, the game play is arguably the more important factor here. Well when you first start CrossCode you may be tricked, like I was, that the game plays pretty well. The world seems fairly expansive, there seems to be a lot of quests to do and the combat feels pretty tight at first. However the more you play the more it all falls apart. The combat being the biggest offender here which starts out OK and then becomes repetetive and obnoxious with almost every encounter being an absolute chore. You can throw little balls at enemies by clicking and then if you pull the mouse near to Lea you can change to a melee attack. You get a sort of Pound Land Sphere Grid that you use to upgrade various things like shot power and aiming speed so you can sort of build Lea to fit your play style. Also on that grid are various skills which seems cool and look very flashy when you do them but most of which are an absolute ballache to pull off in the heat of the combat. Not hard, mind you, the actual execution of the moves is very simple but awkard to do when under fire and ultimately not that useful with the exception of the spin attack you can perform by just holding down the space bar. After a while the game will start to demand that you hit enemies with various elemental attacks or in specific parts of their body which doesn't really add any challenge but sure as fuck adds heaps of annoyance.
The quests are another problem because there are plenty of side activities for you to do but almost all of them are uninteresting and the rewards you get for doing them are PATHETIC. I spent the first few streams of the game trying to dilligently do all the quests I could find as I got them but they were so boring, so samey and the rewards so bloody useless that I stopped and just powered through the game as fast as I could. Although the world design didn't make that easy because while the world seems large, its not very interesting. Every area has a unique theme but every part of that area looks the same so once you've spent 10 minutes running around its very easy to just get bored and glaze over. The world is also very cluttered and hard to navigate with the game demanding that you run across platforms and up and down different elevations but there are numerous points when that becomes a real pain the ass because the perspective is dogshit and the graphics are muddy as fuck. These smug pricks KNEW this was a problem as well because they showed some footage from a new, very similar looking game they are working on via twitter where the environments have shifted to proper 3D graphics to make that shit clearer.
The game is also mind boggingly long for absolutely no good reason. When its not wasting your time with shit exploration and shit side quests, its having you navigate maybe the most annoying Zelda-esque dungeons I've ever played through in my life. All of them essentially the same fucking thing just with a different coat of paint depending on what the flavor of element you're getting is and filled to the brim with the most long winded, tedious and sometimes painfully obtuse puzzles you've ever seen. Each dungeon is extremely formulaic with them being structured like puzzle→combat→puzzle ad nauseum until you get the dungeons specific element power, then repeat again until the boss. The puzzles are are quite samey to, usually involving pushing blocks, bouncing balls into targets or clearing a path for a slow moving ball to hit a thing to open a door. The bosses at the end of each dungeon are also extremely uninspired so if you've played basically any Zelda game since A Link To the Past you've seen basically everything that Crosscode has to offer.
There is SO MUCH more detail I could go into about why I hate this game but if I did that this blog post might be the size of a Russian Novel (that means over 200k words, by the way) so to sum it up for you Crosscode has shit writing, shit world design, shit gameplay, shit dungeons, shit progression and some quite pretty yet very busy and annoying pixel art. Somehow this game is quite well liked within the indie scene and I just don't get it. One day I'll replay CrossCode and actually write that Russian Novels worth of a critique for a YouTube video but for now consider this the TLDR version of why I think it sucks
Fuck this game
