It's time to build our own post-apocalyptic car with bazookas and head into the chaos! Sounds cool? Crossout Legends offers us exactly that. This is a spin-off of the original 2015 game Crossout, a free-to-play online title for PC and consoles known for its combination of vehicle building and “Mad Max”-style PvP combat. After a full ten years of evolution, updates and added factions, we welcomed the Nintendo Switch version, packaged as "Legends".
Construction, destruction and a dose of improvisation
For those who haven't heard of the original, Crossout revolves around building your own vehicle of death and sending it to arenas where you battle other players. All parts of the car - chassis, wheels, engines, weapons - have their own statistics, and the special charm is that they are also destructible. Hit your opponent in the wheel? It falls away. Hit the cannon off his shoulder? There is no more cannon. Not infrequently it happened to me that I would lose my robotic legs and stand there like a poor thing, then I would shoot until I was judged. Sometimes they take away all my weapons, but hey, I can still run away and buy time for my colleagues. This gives every fight a dose of improvisation and strategy, you're not there just to shoot everything you've got, but to decide what you're going to knock down.
First steps: choose wisely!
The tutorial takes you through the basics of three possible vehicles - there are fast buggies, armored tankette i bizarre robotic walker. Each has its advantages: the buggy is fast and agile, ideal for hit-and-run tactics, the tankette is durable and slower, a front-line option, while the robot combines height and futuristic design and looks like a walker from Star Wars, fatal from a distance. I tried all three in the tutorial, but when I went into a real match, the game locked me into the last vehicle I tested. I wanted to be a fast and agile buggy-ninja, and I ended up as a sluggish mech robot. New access to vehicles is only unlocked later through the grind, so choose carefully.
Buggy, tankette or robot. Choose wisely, because you're stuck with that vehicle
Pew-pew to victory
The gameplay is easy to imagine: we drive our Frankenstein vehicles and collide in a 6v6 team deathmatch. The goal is either to blow up all the opponents, or to capture their base. The games are short, usually completed in a few minutes, which gives the game that special charm, "let's do one more, we'll do it quickly". The combination of quick rounds and varied maps gives the game a solid "pick up and play" vibe. However, after a long time, it becomes a bit tiresome and the controls often work against you. The ride is stiff, the vehicles feel like they have concrete wheels, and the camera sometimes works against you, especially when things get complicated and quick reflexes are required. Minimal communication with the team is possible, but in my experience, for the most part, everyone will do what they want.
Assembly master helps to some extent with assembling the basic skeleton of the vehicle
Grind, grind, damn grind
In theory, Crossroads Legends is a genius concept. In practice – a huge grind. While it's fun to combine different vehicle parts and test their synergies, most parts are locked behind tedious grinding or microtransactions, which stifles the game's creative potential. Many parts are locked, progress is slow, and the feeling of freedom that should be the heart of the game is reduced to waiting or investing real money. Also, the progression system is unnecessarily complicated. Each part of the vehicle has its own power score, and the sum of these scores determines matchmaking. Combining parts quickly becomes work, not play. In addition, the game often warns you when you do something "improperly", instead of teaching you what you can actually do through a tutorial.
One of the many offers during the morning login - buy, buy, buy
Free-to-play hell
Glavni problem ove games je upravo to what je free-to-play. Ne mogu ni pokrenuti igru beige da me ne pozdravi 4–5 prozora: kupi premium, isprobaj new battle dogs, evo ti specijalna ponuda, pretplata, super auto koji ti nudi ove sjajne stvarčice... WITHve odjednom, frommah, without suptilnosti. Znam da je to model which ofržava igru, i postands really korektnih F2P igara gdje ti se ne nabija sve na nos, but here je toliko agresivan da se osjeti as smetnja, and not dodatna opcija.
When you jump into manual vehicle assembly, it's often unclear what you can and can't do until the game warns you later
Port with minimal effort
Although it's called "Legends", this feels more like a port of the mobile version with only basic adaptations for the Switch. Menu navigation is slow, with a million menus and an overly complicated approach to building vehicles, blueprints and factions. Graphically, the game conveys the dusty, apocalyptic atmosphere nicely, and the maps are varied and tactically designed, but compared to the PC version, this looks like a game from the PS3 era. Sharp edges, simple textures and somewhat hollow effects. The game is an obvious mobile port that didn't put too much effort into making it shine on the Nintendo Switch.
The environment evokes the post-apocalypse well, but washed-out textures and 30 fps still spoil the atmosphere.
Crossout Legends has a good base: the idea of building your own vehicles and engaging in fast-paced PvP battles is still fun. The matches are short, explosive and attractive at first, and the destruction of parts gives the fights a certain depth. But that depth quickly dries up. Grind and monetization dominate to such an extent that you feel that fun is in last place. If you want something for a quick PvP fix on the go and don't mind endless "buy this" pop-ups, it might be worth a look.
