So an IRL friend got me playing this a while back, so I thought I’d post about it. Crossfire is basically for those too poor to afford Counter Strike, which is pretty sad really because CS:S isn’t expensive at all and the micro-transaction stuff on Crossfire is likely to cost you more than that at some point.
But the basic premise is the same, you’re a counter terrorist operative (ironic but probably unintentional social commentary really, that both teams consist of counter terrorist agents, each side presumably finding the other team’s actions terrorism), you run around killing other people. In some ways it’s superior to Counter Strike, because there’s a whole ranking/clan system that’s all managed for you and doesn’t rely on ad-hoc matches over 3rd party servers.
But in other ways, it’s vastly inferior to Counter Strike, and just about every other FPS released this millennium. One of those is the lighting, or rather lack thereof. Seriously, I know they probably wanted as wide an audience as possible, but this is ridiculous. Duke Nukem 3D called, it wants it’s lighting code back. The control system is pretty clumsy too, but it didn’t take me too long to get used to it.
But my chief complaint… the number one thing that keeps this game from being any fun at all to a non-casual gamer? The noobs. Seriously, there are only two levels of player on this game, noobs, and “hackers”. I say “hackers” in quote because not everyone is a hacker there are some folks on there who are probably reasonable at FPSes who are immediately labeled “hackers” because they have a K:D ratio above 5.
I am by no means decent at FPSes in any shape way or form – I haven’t dominated at an FPS since Quake 1 and the only reason I’m any good at Team Fortress 2 is because I main medic. But in contrast to my low-grade skill, there are so many people on Crossfire who are absolutely terrible, it was nothing for me to rack up a 30:1 K:D ratio pretty trivially… of course until I was voted out of the room for “hacking”.
So there you have it, if you’re not hardcore enough to keep up with the CS:S crowd, consider installing Crossfire. It’s free to play, and you might actually enjoy it – I did, for a little while.