I'm usually a bit wary of games that take place within a game, though I'm glad I gave this one a try. It's an action RPG and platformer where you are playing as Lea, a character in an MMO. The problem is she is apparently in a coma with no memories, and with the help of Sergey, she plays through the MMO with a guild of players called The First Scholars. She does this despite being unable to speak, she can only saw a handful of words that Sergey has hardcoded for her.
There is a very interesting concept to this MMO, that being your Avatars are in the physical world on an Island called 'The Playground'. Basically, they are controlled by VR of some kind. Things get a little... weird when you start to really think about instances, but it's best to just not think on it. The physics of how this world actually works do fall apart if you dwell on it too much.
There is a lot about the story I can't really talk about without spoiling anything. For the most part, you just play through the dungeon, learn a bit about the world within the MMO, and see the interactions between Lea and Emilie, occasionally a few other players. There is a growing plot thread around Lea and her dreams, and the reason why Sergey is helping her out, but the majority of the game is surrounding Lea and her interactions with various other PCs.
The game can feel a bit all over the place in terms of quality in that regards. While Lea and Emilie's relationship is the driving force, I just don't really buy it. Emilie, as it turns out, doesn't realize Lea can't actually talk for most of the game, and yet feels very attached to Lea. Emilie herself is also rather obnoxious, and I never really found myself liking all the time you end up spending with her.
Contrast that to Lukas, who later on in the game you are with for a time. In the limited time frame this is going on, I feel more of a connection between Lukas and Lea then I had the entire time I'd spent with Emilee. Even the brief interactions you can see between Lukas and Buggy you feel a pretty strong bond between the two. While Lukas showed they can do a good job building a relationship without having Lea being able to speak more than a few words, I think to keep her mute overall hurt that portion of the game. It does work for the occasional scene, almost always for a joke. That said, the good moments here outweigh the bad. The game is pretty consistently funny when it wants to be, and there are a lot of very well done scenes and characters to keep you invested.
As for the actual plot, I may end up doing a separate article to go into it due to the spoilers, but I'll do my best, to sum up my issue in a non-spoiler way here. The more you think about what 'The Good guys' are doing and have done, the more it seems all of this would be avoidable if every one of them wasn't a complete moron. Yes, the 'villain' of the game is doing a bad thing, but I find it really hard to hate the guy that much when compared to the people whose side I am supposed to be on. I mean at least he knows what he's doing is wrong, on the other hand the 'good guys' are pretty much responsible for all of this because for a bunch of scientists who make nerd jokes they seem very, very unfamiliar with all the science fiction out there, and I'll leave it at that for the review. The short version is, of course, this was all going to go wrong. Maybe not in this particular way, but it was never going to end well.
Once you look past how dumb they are, and the... interesting and somewhat bizarre choice of the final boss (Narrative, I'll talk mechanics in a minute), the story does still manage to get you to care about a lot of the people involved. There are many great scenes, some solid dialogue, and several interesting ideas.
There are some uncomfortable jokes though. You know how there are those horror movies that basically acknowledge how stupid many tropes are while actively still doing them? Well, this game has an occasional habit of poking fun at games in early access, games released with features not yet included, and the story of the game you are playing not being complete until either DLC or an update patch. Every one of these things applies to this game, though admittedly it's the story of the in-game MMO that remains incomplete. That said, considering you joined a guild whose sole focus is to be the first group to discover what the finale of this particular MMO is going to be, and much of the game is focused on completing the MMO's story, the lack of conclusion to one of the things you spent so much time on is frustrating.
There is one last issue I take with this game, though your mileage on this will vary. I don't feel like I'm actually playing an MMO, I just feel like I'm playing an action platformer with a couple AI companions. Capturing an MMO feel would be exceptionally difficult I imagine, but the disconnect between what you are playing and what you are supposed to be playing is very noticeable. It's not a big issue, but worth noting.
On to the gameplay, and this is really where Cross code starts to shine. There are basically two major aspects of the game, combat, and puzzles. Starting with combat, it's a pretty simple idea done wonderfully. You have four key actions in combat: Dashing, Shooting, Guarding, and attacking. All of these function as you would expect. There are a few things in play that add a lot to the basic controls, the first being your arts. As you level you gain CP that can be used to buff your stats, resistances, as well as learn new abilities. These abilities include arts that let you activate a special ability by pressing a button (R2 if you are playing with a PS4 controller like I was) while doing any of the above actions. Without going into too much detail on specifics, you can 'switch' paths on the CP grids and change which ability is currently active.
Furthermore, you can change your element. You have your normal nonelemental mode, as well as one of four elements. You gain CP in each elemental grid as well, and the stat boosts and abilities that you currently have active are based off which element you have on. Furthermore, you can switch between the elements at will, through use them too much you are stuck in base mode until they 'cool down'. With a very basic and simple set of controls, you have access to a lot of options both in the midst of combat as well as adjustments you can make outside of it. This is backed up by some consistently tight controls and a decent variety of enemy encounters.
The second aspect is the puzzles and much like the combat, there is a good variety of puzzles to be found. The consistent among all the games puzzles if you are making use of one or more of your elemental abilities to solve it. Bubbles, for example, can either be frozen with your ice or caused to burst into steam with fire. Some puzzles are short, some can go on for a good while testing both quick reflexes and your ability to foresee what's coming and make adjustments to pillar locations and the like.
Playing with a PS4 controller, there was one issue I came across. The game will show you, to a certain extent, where projectiles are going before you fire them off by outlining a path, which is great. But there are times where even small twitches of your finger on the joystick and completely derail the path if you do it just before firing. As someone who can be a bit... animated when I get into something this can cause frustrating problems, especially on some of the longer puzzles, and the result is having to start over from the beginning. So if you tend to get animated while gaming like I do, or if you are just a bit jittery in general, there can be some frustration during various puzzles. It's not a huge drawback of the game, but it is there all the same. I can't really comment on keyboard and mouse controls in this regard though.
The Boss battles tend to implement a lot of elements of puzzles you've encountered in their dungeons, or later on with the final boss a lot of elements from every dungeon in a pretty fun and grueling final encounter, and it blends combat and puzzle together very well, I can't think of a boss fight from the game that wasn't fun to play through.
There is one criticism I have of the game's combat, and that's as you approach the later stages, so long as you are decent at dodging having a piece of gear that comes with HP regen, and some of the abilities you can pick up to regenerate HP, the challenge does dissipate rapidly. This is especially true with some of the end game gear you can snag, a couple pieces of HP regenerating gear, and even in my basic mode with no elements turned on I had little reason to even watch my HP, and this was even truer when I had turned on the Wave element. Even the final boss barely felt like he was taking a scratch out of me. And I hadn't even fully decked out in available gear. So while the actual set up is very well made, fun, and figuring out how to combat the many stages of that late game boss is fun, I was very disappointed at how quickly certain abilities dragged down the difficulty curve of the game.
The game also looks fantastic. There is a lot of great details in characters and enemies, the blocky appearance of much of the land mass you traverse through gives it a fun and intentional video-gamey aesthetic, and it comes with a decent soundtrack to back it all up, though the soundtrack is admittedly a bit generic sounding. It's actually through the animation and art where Lea, the main character, gets most of her personality showcased given the lack of dialogue from her, and the game does a good job with it.
Without downgrading the game, however, there is an issue with the game frequently crashing. Now, they included an easy way to revert it to a previous version, and for the most part the game feels the same regardless, so you're not really missing much if you have to do this. It's still a bit frustrating the slightly better version of the game you can't really play right now, though I do hope they eventually get around to fixing this issue.
In the end, Crosscode is one of the most fun games I've played this year, even with some of the very frustrating elements of the story. The combat is fun beginning to end despite the rapid decline in difficulty, and the puzzles constantly keep you on our toes. Throw in some random quests you can do, which I generally ignored in favor of the gear you get by trading loot but they are a fun option all the same, and you really have a game that any fan of action platformers can enjoy and a simple and intuitive enough control scheme that even newcomers of the genre would feel at ease, so long as they are up for a bit of a challenge.
