These Racing Games SUCK!
3. Fast & Furious Crossroads
Twenty-One.
No that's not the number of seconds it takes Vin Diesel to make reporters he finds attractive feel uncomfortable after starting an interview but the actual peak player count for Fast And Furious Crossroads when it smashed into storefronts before puking on its own dashboard.
The peak player count. On the week of its launch. Twenty-One. I genuinely think I could muster up more people to lick electrical fences than that just by yelling out my front door, and remember, my neighbors hate me.
That being said for those unlucky few, they had to contest with a game so unbearably ugly through and through that twenty-one likely came to reflect the number of minutes they could stomach in total before deleting from Steam.
Whereas most race tracks are designed with some thought and care for the player's enjoyment, Fast And Furious Crossroads look like it based its entire course creation mentality on the emotional investment of its lead voice actors as the resulting flatline makes for an experience akin to falling asleep at the wheel.
Seriously Vin what are you drinking between takes? Tranquilizers and Tequilla?
Not that you'll have to worry about driving headfirst into oncoming traffic because while these cars may look like they're made of tin foil draped over the graphics engine from Lego Racers, each is secretly a tank and therefore you can crash through with nary a worry. I know that the film franchise is one to take the laws of physics over its knee from time and time but here it feels so lazy and slapdash to the point that it's utterly aggravating.
If we were being kind to the game we'd call its approach to moment-to-moment gameplay "cinematic" in that it attempts to weave sections together as you might expect from a movie, however, if we were being realistic this is more "ropey VHS copy someone taped off of ITV complete with advert breaks" as the action is so stop-start and so clumsily stitched together that even Dr Frankenstein would struggle to breathe life into this corpse.
This burnout clone with a popular IP stapled to it's mug is about as low as video game tie-ins can stoop, and thankfully audiences around the world voted with their wallets and turned Crossroads into simply being crossed off any future wishlists.