I'm not ashamed to admit that I was looking forward to this at one point. When "CrossfireX" was first announced at E3 2019, I made nothing of it other than surprise hearing that it was "a PC legend" with over 650 million players that I somehow never heard a word about beforehand (its popularity traces back to Asia, specifically China and South Korea). Hell, I know Wikipedia isn't the most accurate source, but they list it as having more players than "Minecraft!" How big is the planet? Either way, while I made nothing of it then, I got a bit intrigued when I saw footage of the single-player campaign, which was being handled by Remedy Entertainment (the good people behind "Alan Wake" and "Control"). I was interested to see more, but then I noticed how quiet all the parties had gone on it for a while, and early previews I had read didn't exactly paint the game in a positive light. After spending some time with the multiplayer and one of the game's two campaigns...it's abundantly clear why this travesty was dumped so quietly.
Pretty much all of the nice things I can say about "CrossfireX" relate to that single-player campaign (I played the "Operation Catalyst" campaign, and sadly can't speak on "Operation Spectre" in this review). At its core, it's a standard military FPS game, but at the very least, it functions decently with some solid gunplay. There's also a slowdown feature that works well for the game's shooting. The visuals are strong, and there are moments in the campaign that have those Remedy touches to them: some supernatural elements kick in here and there, and we get some of those well-established reality-bending moments that we've expected after playing games like "Alan Wake" and "Control."
Quite frankly, though, that's the nicest thing I can say about the campaign that I played. While it has some creative concepts under the surface, the campaign just ends up feeling like a pale imitation of Xbox 360 shooters, without much that shows growth or improvement on the style. It feels like someone dug up a game from that era and touched up the visuals a bit but completely forgot that 2007 was 15 years ago and didn't alter the game to feel like it belongs in a modern setting. The story doesn't take those supernatural elements far enough, the characters are forgettable, and the AI can be a joke. That said, you want to know what's an even bigger joke than the campaign's AI? The entirety of the multiplayer. Smilegate, the developer of the previous entries in the franchise, handles the multiplayer here, but wow...what a disgrace. The single-player and multiplayer feel like two completely different games, and in the case of the multiplayer...I mean, I can't even think of anything nice to say. It never feels fun or smooth to play, the gunplay and aiming is disgusting and awkward to handle, the game is absolutely busted with glitches (I constantly got locked while selecting my loadout DURING THE MATCH), and there is almost no content whatsoever. Even with the fact that you get the classic "Crossfire" multiplayer along with the new one, the game is so feature-deprived and messy that it makes "Battlefield 2042" look well-adjusted in comparison. Truthfully, if the campaign feels like it was pulled from a 2007 shooter, the multiplayer feels even older than that. It wouldn't be unreasonable if you played the multiplayer of this game and couldn't figure out what made it popular in the first place. What should've been the game's bread and butter ends up being its worst element, and it would need a top-to-bottom overhaul to have anything that even remotely resembles "longevity."
Overall, "CrossfireX" deserves some credit for being one of the worst games that I've played in an extremely long time, and for reaching a level of personal futility that only three other games have gone to before this. The multiplayer in and of itself may be close to the worst thing I've ever played, and it's gotten me to a point where I almost have no hope that it could ever be fixed. The campaign is at least a bit better than the multiplayer...but so is closing a car door on your balls, so what is that really saying? I can't even give the multiplayer points for being free-to-play, because even with it being free-to-play, I somehow feel entitled to a refund. At least getting it through Xbox Game Pass helped it to not be a total waste, but nevertheless, this is an embarrassment of a game. If I had to rate the two halves individually, the campaign is probably a 4/10, while the multiplayer doesn't even deserve a score but would genuinely get a 0/10. Neither one is particularly worth your time, and there's not much you'd get out of this that you wouldn't get from a replay of a classic "Call of Duty" or "Battlefield" game other than hints of what could've been in the campaign.
Final rating: 2 out of 10 "Abhorrent"