For more than a decade, Crossfire has been a powerhouse in PC first-person shooters outside the US, especially in Asia. The free-to-play title is primed to make the leap to Xbox One and Xbox Series X later this year as CrossfireX, and with it will come a new addition: a single-player campaign created by Remedy Entertainment, the studio behind Control, Alan Wake, and Max Payne.
During Microsoft’s recent Xbox Games Showcase, we got a closer look at what Remedy has planned for CrossfireX, although the details were still pretty vague. After the show, Remedy gave a more thorough presentation to media that provided more insight on what CrossfireX’s campaign will be like. The presentation also provided a sense of what Remedy is adding to the Crossfire formula and how the studio will boil down more than a decade of growth, adaptations, and alterations into a coherent story.
The hands-off gameplay demo we saw expanded on the CrossfireX trailer that appeared during the showcase, focusing on Luis Torres, a “skilled thief” and civilian in the game’s world. The mission we saw started with Luis handcuffed on a prison bus, where a guard speaks with him in a brief character-building moment–before a drone flies beneath the bus and explodes, flipping it. It seems that Global Risk, one of the two factions at the heart of Crossfire, and its leader, General Maddox, are after Luis. Luckily, he escapes the crash and absconds into a hospital, where the player takes control of him to shoot their way through Global Risk goons and meets up with Black List operatives hoping to extract him.
