Crossfire 2 (V1.03)


Title           Crossfire 2 (V1.03)
Game Type       Shoot-em-up
Publisher       Apc-tcp, 2002/3
Developer       Dreamworlds Developments
Players         1 or 2
Compatibility   All
HD Installable  Yes (Required)
Submission      Tony Aksnes

Review

Introduction
First of all I must mention that this game has three ways you can install
it to hard disk, small, medium or large And of course I installed the
large version. (640megs). The installation is good and fast (compared to
a Hyperion install) and it shows you stuff from the game while it installs
(great feature).

The Preference Gui
The Older versions had some niggles here when you wanted to use AGA etc,
but this is fixed in 1.03, beyond that the GUI is good and does what you
expect it to do! I selected AHI (8 channel) and Chunckyppc Workbench
Window mode and pressed Save. (thats all I needed to do).

Its all about to begin
This is where it all became very good and professional looking, unlike the
demo version, the full game boasts great animations in the intro, a main
menu (nice asteroid field animation) and cutscenes throughout the game.
Here in the main menu you have the required settings (as in the demo
version). A huge tip here is that you might want to turn off or half the
flash screen option, as later in the game it will more or less turn the
screen white due to the sheer amount of action.

So it all starts
First thing you will notice is that if you play single player (missions)
there is a Training screen (turtorial) and this is important that you
complete, and i am not kidding as if you dont then you wont understand the
basics of the game, like "HIDE" or escape etc. Then after this you are
presented with the story, sadly the story has obviously been translated to
english from german and the english aint exactly good (like mine), but it
does the job nicely but i still think that the story is too LONG (too much
text), i skipped many Of the text screens (after looking on the great
pictures :)

Info about the game
Well its a bit like stardust/super stardust and many other games, but
mainly I think of this game as freespace (hyperion) in 2D with nice
raytraced graphics, and unlike games like stardust there is not always the
necessity to just kill all the enemies. Sometimes you must hide, develop a
turret gun setup etc and later on you have ground missions (drive a tank
etc). There are a bucket loads of weapons to choose from, and the game is
based on credits (money) for buying weapons and sadly later on you get a lot
of money but no place on your ship to hold more than 3 weapons, so its all
about choosing the correct weapon for the current mission. I must also add
that there are missions where you won't get weapons at all and other
missions where you get weapons free of charge (that mission is superb!).

In total there are 26 levels in the game, and I must admit that this was
too little for me and my hardcore shooter appetite as I completed the game
in less than 10 hours, but for normal people I think it will last a bit
longer.

The other part of the game
There is a multiplayer game here as well, but because I have no one to
play with this won't be used too much. It will remind you a lot of
Rocketz and similar games (dogfighting etc). It looks neat and plays great
but since there is no TCP/IP function or similar, this feature requires you
to have one or more friends nearby who will play with you. Team mode is
also an option, where you can wipe out the computer ships together.

The Up's and Down's With the game
As I said earlier , for me this game is too small and too easy but I still
love it and I know I will play it again. As I said earlier there is no
TCP/IP feature (lan/Inet etc) so the game won't live forever. Some people
will give up after 10 minutes in the game (if they dont understand the
turtorial). The graphics are good, but only in 320x256x16 on a classic
Amiga with P5 ppc's (The A1 or Pegasos should run it nicely in Highres).
There is excellent music which sadly hogs the cpu a bit on my current
setup (highend a1200 ppc) and the sound effects will blow you away!

Special effects and weapons that will make you go "WOOOOOAAAAAH"
The End of game sequence and last mission was a bit too WEIRD!
There are some of spelling mistakes in the game (quite a few!).


Last Note
A game many will love and a lot more will hate, for the normal shoot em up
king this game would be too easy. Due to its loss of TCP/IP this game won't
reach as high as it deserves on the ranking table. I recommend this game
to EVERYONE, and I wish the developers the best of luck with the sales
numbers of this game!..

total Score: 90%

Machine tested on: A1260/66/ppc/240 Mediator/voodoo3/sb128 etc (128megs ram)


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