CrossCode

So much disappointment. The puzzles are good but the controls are far to bad and clunky for the fast position work they want you to do in the gimmicky combat. You have the feeling that you fighting the controls and not the enemies.

The story and visuals are good, but none of it matters to me because combat is pretty much trash. You tap rapidly to throw little balls, hold down to charge big balls. That's it. Training is over, go home. Since this is a game set in a CYBERIZED SYNTHBODY GAME WORLD where an entire continent on an alien world has apparently become a place for people to log into virtual bodies to act out their dreams, the technology level is like Ghost in the Shell. So I was hoping for, oh, some technologically advanced weapons? Nope. And all the GAME can say is that the girl is in a class of her own with balls *snicker*. Truly something else. Glaring writing oversights aside, skills are pathetic and underwhelming, items don't do squat other than +1 defense/health/armor/etc., and it is truly an astoundingly large miss in game design. For comparison, the original Zelda had the sword with THREE attack (slash, charge, circle attack) plus bombs, hookshot, angry fairies, etc. I mean, COME ON!!! You're not even going back before 16 bit nostalgia, and 8-bit is kicking your ass!

This is another one of the “Let’s simulate an MMO” with a boring story and TONS of reading. Just any NPC has like a five-paragraph essay of useless lore they want to tell you. The game is designed with a lot of fluff. Every chest feels you need to unlock 10 secrets just to get an item that you can get from an enemy or tree that is right next to it. Every enemy has a guard break. You cannot go up to an enemy and just attack it. You have to break its guard in order to do real damage to it. There is nothing more fun than shooting a goat in the butt 100 times in order to kill it. The world is very boring and getting every piece of items from chests before going to the next area seems worthless. Because as soon as you move to the next area, your gear is worthless. The new enemies in the new area has such a high difficulty spike, it does not matter if you have best item from the previous area. The best part of the game are the dungeons. They are challenging and fun, but follow the game's model of everything is a secret. You seem to make real progress in these dungeons that you do not feel completing any of the side quest in the over world. This is a cheap money grab at your love of 16-bit games with a lot of fluff.

First thing you wanna do is go to the options menu and crank down the difficulty. Now enemies won't hit you like a ton of bricks you might actually get some enjoyment out of Crosscode. That is unless you are like me and find yourself sick to death of block pushing and flip switching puzzles. Which you will be doing for many, many hours in Crosscode. Also sphere bouncing, the main mechanic of this game. It starts out tame but will eventually require you to be so precise, it becomes infuriating. Sometimes I get the impression we are so blinded by nostalgia for games of early 90s, that we don't realize how very flawed that age of gaming was. Guys, let me tell you... NOBODY LIKES ICE SLIDE PUZZLES. You may think you do, but you don't. This is your brain lying to you because you used to do this as a kid back when your world was still rose tinted with childhood innocence. Aside from a few dungeons most of what you will be doing is grinding for quests and exploration. A gimmick of Crosscode are elevation puzzles, in order to reach a specific area you have to climb over ledges in the correct order. Isometric perspective however makes elevation judgment impossible. Plus you jump automatically when you run over a ledge, causing you to drop and fall and having to do everything over again. How I wish I just had a regular jump button. Not a fan of the MMO aesthetic, it cheapens the immersion when I'm constantly reminded that oooh it's a game within a game! Jabs at MMO & internet culture come off as trite rather than funny. The graphics look like standard pixel graphics, nice but nothing special. For some reason the scrolling backgrounds made me oddly dizzy... The plot takes hours to get going, characters are flat and forgettable. I cannot fault Crosscode for lack of content, it is a solidly made time sink. What it isn't is a game, more like a patchwork love letter to a very specific era of videogames. With all the outdated sensibilities from that era.

This game crashes at least once an hour which makes it even more of a chore to play than it already is. Unfortunately this is now basically unplayable for me as the crashes are now just too frequent for me to deal with.