Fast & Furious: Crossroads

With Fast 9’s theatrical release delayed until 2021 due to the Coronavirus pandemic, Fast & Furious Crossroads could have given fans a jolt of vehicular mayhem to tide them over. Even with the star power of Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, and Tyrese Gibson reprising their roles as Dom, Letty, and Roman, respectively, this combat-racing experience sputters along like a clunker on its last mile, gasping for someone to hit the brakes and take it to the junkyard.

With the petrolhead pedigree of Slightly Mad Studios, I expected far, far better of Fast & Furious Crossroads. There are certainly glimpses of a game that respects the film franchise as much as fans do, with a well-curated vehicle roster, some familiar sequences that riff on the some of the most memorable moments from the movies, and the occasional cheeky wink at the audience, but overall Fast & Furious Crossroads is a short and superficial relic of a previous generation.

The Fast and Furious films are well-known for being a stupid good time, where logic comes behind fun and the focus is on flashy cars and family. To be successful, all Fast and Furious: Crossroads had to do was take this well-established formula and create a fun action-packed driving game. Crossroads is not that. What we have instead is a barely competent, barely fun, five-hour experience that reminds me of why licensed games have slowly died off.

Even though 2020 is easily one of the worst years in recent memory, there is one thing that is undeniable. So far, this has been an amazing year for games, with titles like Ghost of Tsushima, Half-Life: Alyx, and Doom Eternal. I was starting to forget what it felt like to play a truly bad game, since the amount of fantastic titles being released over the last few months was so vast. Then Fast & Furious Crossroads got released…

Overall then, Fast & Furious Crossroads is a serious disappointment. There’s a gleam of the franchise’s over-the-top action now and again, and some of the cutscenes hint at the cheesy humour the movies are known for. But those moments are few and far between. Underwhelming visuals and uninspiring mission design stop Fast & Furious Crossroads from being a good game – but it’s the terrible, terrible handling that relegates it into ‘bad’ territory.

No matter how you spin it, Fast and Furious Crossroads is just plain bad in nearly every way.

Fast & Furious Crossroads is the closest the series has come yet to delivering an experience worthy of the blockbuster movie franchise, but skids off track with dull missions, frustrating mechanics, and lonely multiplayer lobbies. Crucially, the driving itself just isn’t fun, resulting in a bland experience interchangeable with any other street racing franchise.

Fast & Furious Crossroads is a melting pot of ideas, none of which have had time to mature. Poor vehicle handling, weird pacing, unloved online multiplayer, inconsistent visuals, the list goes on. All of those Facebook comments lambasting the trailer for ‘PS2-era graphics’ are wide of the mark. It’s PS2-era physics, dialogue and level design too.