Review: Crossfire: Legion Takes the Franchise in a New Direction

Crossfire: Legion takes the franchise in a bold new direction, sure to delight fans of strategy games. While fans have gotten a taste for the game in Early Access, it’s move to full launch allows us to celebrate this black sheep installment in the popular franchise. Overall, Crossfire has made a legion of fans thanks to its snappy first-person shooter mechanics, so it was a risk Blackbird Legion to throw that out the window for a real-time strategy game.

But sometimes innovation takes a calculated risk, and the Crossfire franchise borrowed a page out of Halo: ODST’s playbook. Fortunately for fans of both the genre and the franchise, there’s a lot to love with Crossfire: Legion’s approach to combat.

A Winning Strategy

While not quite reaching the highs of other genre standards like XCOM, Crossfire: Legion gives players a lot of options as they attempt to control the chaos of combat from a bird’s eye view. Players choose from three factions in conflict with one another: Black List, Global Risk, and New Horizon. These factions are distinct not only from a story point of view but flavor the combat in different ways.

For instance, Black List’s troops are speedy guerilla fighters. Overall, no matter which team you picked, you never feel overpowered or like a scrappy underdog. Crossfire: Legion does a great job at balancing things out.

Unfortunately, the campaign isn’t as long as I wished it to be. Coming in at around nine hours or so, the campaign moves at a brisk speed over its 15 missions. Fortunately, there are several modes to entertain yourself with afterward including multiplayer. Players can battle each other in PVP across seven distinct maps. The game also features several co-op modes against the computer such as Arcade, Defense, and Attack modes.

Into the Heat of Battle

While the campaign leaves a bit to be desired, it does a great job at easing players into the game’s mechanics without ever being too confusing or bogged down. For fans of the genre, they should know what to expect at this point. Crossfire: Legion doesn’t try to reinvent real-time strategy games as we know it, but the game does offer a fun branch from the series’ usual roots.

Players gather resources, plan attacks with their units, and try to flank the enemy. 3 vs. 3 mode offers an often chaotic battlefield where players have to think fast on their feet. Unfortunately, the game lacks an offline bots mode or offline split-screen mode for these activities. So if you’re planning on playing, we hope your Wi-Fi is up to snuff.

Crossfire: Legion may not win over all fans of the franchise, especially those looking for more shooter thrills, but it is an interesting shake-up of the formula. While sometimes franchise’s can float too close to the sun, this installment has enough working for it to make it a worthy part of the Crossfire brand.