When you thought that we have seen every version of shoot-em up games possible, along comes another that adds a little twist to that genre. Crossfire is one of them as the title suggests, you will be in a crossfire as it joins the maze / shoot-em up kind with an added element of a pressure cooker. A heart pounding ride from the first to your last man, forward planning is a must to survive as this game will definitely separate the men from the boys.
As the title suggest, very quickly you will discover that being in a crossfire is no joke. Set in a six by seven grid like pattern separated by a block in between, the aliens are ready to move in starting at the edges of the screen. So basically the plot of the game is that the aliens have landed and block by block they are closing in, aiming to take over the city. Only you stand in their way for total domination.
So as they are closing in from all directions, you will discover almost from the get-go you can be fired upon from any direction. The only direction you will be ‘safe’ is from the bottom as there are no aliens there (thank goodness). So they are located to your left / right and top of the screen. However they can move from behind up if you move towards the middle so in effect, there’s no real safe area.
Luckily you can shoot in all four directions however the game is not forgiving. For starters, you only have three lives and can only shoot thirty five times. Once down to your last ten missiles, a blinking cursor pops up at random so you need to run it over to replenish. And to make matters worse, every level you complete, the next level you start off with five less missiles until you reach the minimum of fifteen.
However there’s a tactic behind this as once you almost hit the less than ten threshold, try placing your man near the middle of the screen as the reload cursor will pop up pretty close to you otherwise it will pop up quite literally in the opposite direction from you…that is very close to those aliens. And there’s nothing worse trying to navigate your way through those aliens with only a handful of missiles left trying to run over the blinking cursor.
The good news is that you can earn an extra life for every five thousand points and killing those aliens can earn you ten to eighty points – and there’s plenty of them to shoot at. The bad news is that once you kill an alien, it will resurrect three more times before ultimately destroyed. And if that’s not bad enough, each resurrect ‘level’ is a more aggressive alien. And I mean aggressive as the level four alien will bull doze its way towards you firing many bullets at a time and if there’s another alien in its path, there’s a good chance it will collide with it therefore killing it. So you can say the level three and four aliens needs anger management.
Yet you can play this to your advantage as considering the level one / two aliens are quite passive (slow moving), if you have a mixture between those angry / passive ones, the angry ones will most likely run over the passive ones thus killing it. Granted that they will resurrect to the next level however the good news is that you save missiles this way. And for every twelve shots fired, a nice icon will appear that if you run over it, you earn a further one hundred points however you have six shots to do this otherwise you miss out.
And what’s even better, there are four of them in total earning you more points consecutively – that is the first, as explained before, entitles you one hundred points, the second two hundred, the third four hundred and the last eight hundred. So you can potentially rake up fifteen hundred points if you time your ammo count to perfection.
Visually and sound wise, it’s only average at best. The aliens at each level do look different therefore it’s easy for you to recognise what stage they are up to (and the obvious aggression level). Passing each changes the background colour and eventually it cycles through back to its original colour. To memory I only done this once however I’m not sure at what level it does that. The sound is quite nice from the alien exploding to the beep noise when you are almost run out of missiles. However when passing over those bonus icons (the ones where it pops out after twelve shots fired) it sounds like someone let one off – seriously.
There’s no ending to this game other than killing off your men so in effect, you can go on forever still on average the game will last around ten to fifteen minutes or so. Yet make no mistake that the game shows no mercy and it’s an absolute pressure cooker from start to finish. It’s brutal and frustrating all rolled into one however remarkably satisfying especially when you narrowing escape a crossfire from all directions. A game that truly lives for its title, only your nerves and forward planning will dictate your expiry date.