Fast and Furious Crossroads Review – Engine Failure (PS4)

The Fast and Furious films are well-known for being a stupid good time, where logic comes behind fun and the focus is on flashy cars and family. To be successful, all Fast and Furious: Crossroads had to do was take this well-established formula and create a fun action-packed driving game. Crossroads is not that. What we have instead is a barely competent, barely fun, five-hour experience that reminds me of why licensed games have slowly died off. 

I’m personally not a huge fan of the franchise, but I can definitely see the appeal. Cars go fast, characters talk about bonds and family, and stuff explodes. And then there’s the constant one-upping ridiculousness of more massive and absurd set pieces and situations than each film before. That’s Fast and Furious in a nutshell, and while Crossroads technically has all of that, it does it with about as much gusto as a wet fart. 

Crossroads has you playing an original story that was intended to lead into the next film, featuring both new and returning characters. You’ll see all the familiar faces and themes you expect here, with the added benefit of the original actors voicing their respective characters. For fans of the franchise, the story might be worth playing through just to see these characters and get a hint at the future—especially with the ninth film delayed to next year—but I’m honestly having trouble remembering much of what happened at all. 

Fast and Furious Crossroads Review – Quarter Mile at a Time

A lot has been said regarding how Crossroads looks, but in all fairness, Crossroads isn’t actually that bad graphically. Don’t get me wrong, it definitely doesn’t hold a candle to games like The Last of Us Part II and Ghost of Tsushima, or anything like that, but it’s far from the worst looking game I’ve seen this generation. There were even some moments that had me fairly impressed, such as seeing the word “Barcelona” in the sky when you first start driving there. 

With a pretty faithful story for the series, all Crossroads had to do was have fun driving in cool cars with those ridiculous action set pieces the series is known for. Sadly this is where the ball is dropped completely, because Crossroads has some of the worst driving I’ve seen in a game, let alone in one that is all about cars. 

It can be very difficult to describe something like “game-feel” without actually playing yourself, but I’m trying to save you from having to play this, so I’ll sum it up as best I can. Driving in Crossroads feels like it’s trying to be arcadey and slippery, whilst also being really heavy and hard to move. You feel weighty, yet you pinball off walls and other cars like you’re made of rubber. There’s no feedback from driving whatsoever—you never feel like you’re going that fast, except when you use nitro and end up flying into a wall thanks to the awful camera not being able to keep up. I went fast. I ended up furious.

All of these factors combine to make Crossroads one of the worst feeling driving games I’ve played in my life. There were a few rare moments where I could almost disconnect from what I was playing and just enjoy driving forwards, but then it’d be interrupted by actually having to play the game’s awful missions. 

Fast and Furious Crossroads Review – All About Family

One of the biggest problems I had with Crossroads is the mission design. Besides a few rare sections that open up the road slightly, you will be spending almost all of your time just driving straight on a road towards an objective. I’m not kidding, you can genuinely just hold R2 and follow the road almost the whole time. The big set pieces that Fast and Furious is known for are here too, but they’re generally pretty boring and don’t do much to up the ante. They’re the most fun you’ll get out of the whole game, but that’s not saying much. 

The phrase “whole game” is actually not that applicable here anyway, since Crossroads takes about four hours to get through. On the one hand I was grateful to not have to play anymore of an awful game, but on the other, this is a full-priced release that doesn’t even give you a fun few hours. There is an online mode for the players that care enough, but there clearly aren’t any of them out there because I couldn’t find a match no matter how hard I tried, despite the game just releasing a week or so ago. I can’t imagine adding other human players to the mix does anything for the awful driving though. 

The biggest sin that Crossroads commits is being boring; a sad take for a franchise that is definitively not. Whether you like the series or not, you can’t argue that the films are almost always bombastic and entertaining, whereas here it’s just really uninteresting and flat, doing both the Fast and Furious franchise and driving games both a disservice. There are some bad licensed games out there that I could still recommend to the hardcore fans out of love for the series but Fast and Furious Crossroads is so bad that only the absolute die-hard fans will get any enjoyment out of this one. And even then, you may want to strongly reconsider this stain on an otherwise loved franchise.

Fast and Furious Crossroads review code provided by publisher. Reviewed on PS4. For more information on scoring please read our Review Policy.