Another one bites the dust in a year of live-service shutdowns. Smilegate’s CrossfireX, a game released a little less than a year ago, will end all support by the middle of May and will become little more than a figment of our imaginations.
As of right now, any sales on the Xbox Store have been halted, and no further content will be added to the game. Anyone who made any purchases within the last 14 days (as of Feb. 3) will be eligible to have them refunded, and the servers will go offline on May 18.
This shutdown also affects the Remedy Entertainment-developed campaigns, as they will also be delisted from the Xbox Store completely. Even more interestingly, this official CrossfireX FAQ regarding its shutdown mentions that players will be able to complete the campaigns “until servers close on May 18.” Thus, it appears CrossfireX will cease to exist in its entirety, no matter whether it’s the single-player or multiplayer portion.
The gaming world has been rocked by major live-service shutdowns as of late, with games like Knockout City and Rumbleverse going offline, but CrossfireX’s closure could very well be the biggest misfire of the bunch. It was the first proper American release in the Crossfire franchise, a series that has dominated Asian countries to the tune of one billion lifetime players.
It was also the first time Crossfire would land on a console, something Xbox made a huge point of mentioning when announcing the project at E3 2019. Microsoft even touted Crossfire as a “PC legend” during the showcase in a further attempt to fuel excitement for this multiplayer first-person shooter. Later news that the game’s multiple single-player campaigns would be handled by Remedy Entertainment, of Alan Wake and Control fame, only increased expectations further.
Sadly, when it arrived in Feb. 2022, it was…being as blunt as possible, a cataclysmic disappointment on both fronts. Very few nice things could be said about either half of the game, as there was very little to salvage in this poorly-conceived package.
On the single-player front, the campaigns were largely uninspired mishmashes of first-person shooter tropes with a level of polish comparable to that of a shooter you’d find in 2007. You wouldn’t expect that given Remedy’s typical quality control (especially since the team had been working on the campaigns since 2016), but this was a dull military shooter in a marketplace crowded with an overwhelming amount of them.
But at least we can say the single-player had some polish; the multiplayer portion felt like it was run over by a truck repeatedly. Right from the jump, this was a multiplayer shooter with sloppy shooting mechanics, which may as well have doomed this mess from the start. And beyond the poor aiming and overall inaccuracy, CrossfireX suffered from a severe dearth of content, as both the “Modern” and “Classic” gameplay styles had limited maps and modes.
Furthermore, the game was a total bug-fest on release, with sensitivity and balance issues throughout (the latter of which was also directly impacted by pay-to-win microtransactions). This is more of a personal experience talking, but while playing, I even remember the game locking up whenever I would open my in-game loadout menu, which often left me as an open target if I happened to view it in a wide-open area.
All of this combined to make CrossfireX about as fun as a wet fart in a quiet room, and while the team at Smilegate tried its best to fix problems and add new content, it was never going to be enough. The developers would’ve needed to give CrossfireX a top-to-bottom, perhaps years-long breakdown and overhaul for it to deliver anything close to its initial promise. Sadly, it wasn’t able to do that, and it will merely go down as yet another live-service failure in a sea of disappointing titles.
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