Fast and Furious: Crossroads reviews are out, and it’s an absolute disaster. Mustering a few pitiful points across Metacritic and other reviewers, this is likely the worst-reviewed game of 2020 – maybe even this generation.
It’s not all Slightly Mad Studios fault – this was meant to be a movie tie-in game, but without a movie to tie itself to (Fast Furious 9 is delayed until Fall because of the pandemic) the game is left drifting across a highway without any brakes.
You only need to take a look at the launch trailer to understand why this game is a total car crash. The jokes about its graphical fidelity are through the roof, with some people asking “I didn’t know they still made PSP games?”
But unfortunately, the negative reviews for Fast and Furious: Crossroads go much deeper than the graphics.
Despite Vin Diesel actually making an appearance in the game, his performance (and the other voice actors, for that matter) is pretty shocking. You’ve got to feel a little bit sorry for the Fast and Furious actor. But who could’ve guessed it was going to go quite this poorly?
Fast and Furious is an old-school formula. It shouldn’t be too difficult to create a game that captures the high-octane drama of an action car movie…right? Even the developer, Slightly Mad Studios, has a bit of decent developer heritage with their PROJECT CARS receiving decent reviews.
But the game lacks any real narrative depth or even many strong gameplay mechanics. In the first hour or so of the game I could handle, I could already tell it was going to be linear and uninteresting. Go from Point A to Point B. In your cool car.
It seems my opinion of the game wasn’t unique. Reviews from IGN, Eurogamer and others are all claiming the same huge problems with the title, despite the game costing a whopping full-price of a triple-A title.
I will say that some of the set-pieces experience in the first hour or so of gameplay had their enjoyable moments. Utilizing different members of the team with different abilities was pretty cool, but it was hardly Mad Max levels of interactive, action-packed driving.
However, there’s no doubt the game is a failure. If you compare the reviews for Fast and Furious: Crossroads with other bottom-of-the-bucket games on Metacritic you’ll see that the game is actually performing even worse than at first thought.