In short, Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire is nothing for anyone to be excited about. The visuals are terrible and the gameplay is choppy. The games mechanics are crap and the final version being presented is horrible. This seems more like an outline for a game than anything. If the game had been delayed it would have at least been playable.

The story is lacking everything that would make it a compelling part of the game. It really doesn’t make that much sense and there is absolutely nothing interesting about it. All we know is there’s a war occurring and both sides have some robots. Whoopdee doo!!!

The worst part of the game by far is the combat. This aspect really needed work. When it came to frame-rate issues I felt like taking a nap and then by the time I woke up hopefully the game had progressed some. Everything is way too slow for anybody to really enjoy. The only time it runs smoothly is if there aren’t any objects in the environment. What’s ironic about this is that all of the objects just look average and are nothing special at all but they still slow down the game tremendously. If you enter an area with many objects or another Gundam just be prepared to go punch something and let out all of the anger you have built up for purchasing the game in the first place. During combat players can lock on to their enemies and fire at them, and surprisingly this actually seems to work okay for the most part. When doing battle with the computer you will get frustrated since the computers AI doesn’t have to deal with the horrible camera angles and slow frame-rates making them a very worthy adversary. I found that the best way to do battle is with the melee weapons as they are extremely effective. In fact they are sometimes the easiest to use due to the horrible camera angles. The only downside to this is that if you use it too much then the computer will catch on to your strategy and stay away from you and attack from a distance.

Normally games find there own personality in the type of missions that they offer but here in Crossfire all the missions really consist of is to destroy everything in your sights. The only differences in the missions are where they take place, whether it is in an open valley or perhaps a jungle. What’s unfortunate here is that in the Gundam games of the past they once prided themselves on the real-world physics system that had destructible buildings that players used while in combat to try and gain an advantage. Here in the next-gen (well, current gen) game the missions lack depth and are really straight forward with no hidden bonuses whatsoever.

During the progression of the game players will be able to purchase new mobile suits and upgrade both their defensive and offensive skills. As the game goes on you will be able to hire pilots between missions, repair the damage you received while fighting, or just flat our purchase new weapons and advanced suits. The downside to this is that you can only do this between missions so choosing whether to repair or buy new equipment is a very important decision because if you balance your money wrong you will be in trouble later on in the game.

I can’t stress how much that this game really looks like a blue-print for something that could be coming out in the distant future, but unfortunately it’s an actual game and it has already been released. It’s really disappointing because the PS3 is capable of so much more than this title shows. Crossfire is so bad that it almost depreciates the value of your PS3. It seems like the game was just thrown together and put on the shelves so people would buy it on the release date since there weren’t many titles to choose from at the time. Everything in the game could be performed on the PS2 no problem.

The main purpose of video games is to entertain but Crossfire doesn’t do this at all. The game ... (continued on next page)