Crossout

Game overview

Crossout is an online shooter based around vehicular combat in a post-apocalyptic future. One might go as far as to say that it is mad… to the max. Or at least, one day it might be, but for the moment Crossout is a few interesting ideas bundled into a grindy open beta. So naturally, a lot of what the game is and offers is subject change over time. Until then, though, Crossout is all about grinding for weapons and car parts in order to build a better vehicle to allow you to continue grinding for even better weapons and car parts.

➔ Main points:

• Vehicular Combat
• High Customization
• Six Distinct Factions
• Dated Graphics, But Light on System Requirements

Full review

So, yes, grinding is Crossout in a nutshell. From your first moments, you’ll be grinding reputation with the game’s first faction, the Engineers, in order to unlock more weapons, car parts, and eventually other factions. Most of this is done through Crossout’s PvP missions. These 8v8 battles pit two teams against each other in two different game modes. Matchmaking does a good job of ensuring that everyone is of roughly the same power, and if there are any empty slots, then bots join the match instead of the vastly overpowered.

Shoot 'em up.

Though the mission screen lists six different types, they all cycle randomly between the two game modes, but at least they offer up different rewards. No matter the mission, the primary objective is to capture a base, either your enemies or a neutral one. But you could always just eliminate the other team. There are no respawns in Crossout’s PvP<, and to make these matches even more interesting, the vehicles are fairly hearty, but you can also choose to target weak points, or specific pieces of the vehicle itself. Blow tires off to slow them down. Blow off armor to expose weak points. Or just blow off an enemy’s weapons to leave them powerless and driving around in circles.

Though

most matches do boil down to eliminating the other team before they can eliminate you

, there are – as previously mentioned – bases to capture as well. That’s the other objective of either game mode. In the first one, you must capture the enemy’s base, and in the other, it’s a neutral base. Either way, you’ll be capturing something – assuming you don’t kill everyone first. Just be on the lookout for anyone sneaky enough to reach your base and capture it while everyone else is busy trying to surgically shoot the guns off vehicles.

The low-quality items that you gain through these missions have a use other than to make your junker a little less junky. They can also be exchanged with your faction, first one being Engineers, for even better weapons and car parts. There’s grinding here, too. The AC43 Rapier auto-cannon requires plenty of resources as well as three machine guns, two cabins, and a pair of wheels. Dump all of that into a blender and voila, an AC43 Rapier pops out.

Manufacturing the Rapier, as well as many other parts, also requires resources gathered from one of Crossout’s other primary game modes: raids. These PvE-focused brawls pit you and three other players against AI-controlled waves of enemies while you try to perform tasks such as retrieving cargo, or defending pumps. These have much looser matchmaking requirements. It’s not uncommon to find a more powerful player basically running a train on the easy missions, which is great if you’re a new player who jumps into a raid without a clue.

Guns on wheels.

You can’t really spam these, either. Raids are gated by means of fuel. Think of fuel as you would stamina in other free-to-play games. You’re allowed a daily allotment of fuel and going on raids guzzles it. You can, however, earn more by attaching a fuel tank to your vehicle and going on PvP missions, or by buying (or selling) fuel on the market. You can also sell everything else you’ve earned through missions or raids on the market.

Everything bought or sold there uses Crossout’s real money currency

. Meaning that you could potentially buy everything in the game by simply grinding enough (save some exclusive vehicle skins). Some of the rarer, more sought-after items have price tags of a few hundred dollars in real money. But of course, like all economies, this one too is subject to shift as time goes on.

After enough grinding, you’ll reach level ten with the Engineers, at which point you can jump ship for one of the other three primary factions: Lunatics, Scavengers, or Nomads. Progression is similar across all factions: grind missions, build rep, and unlock rewards. But on top of these four factions, there are two additional prestige factions. Reaching level ten with the Scavengers unlocks the Steppenwolfs. This military-themed faction rewards vehicles like tanks and walkers. On the other side of the end-game coin are the Dawn’s Children, unlocked by the Nomads. They’re as close to sci-fi as Crossout is going to get and feature nifty things like hover jets and plasma weapons.

Walking machines of death.

With all that you can earn through factions and on missions and raids, customization is key in Crossout. After enough time, you’ll have amassed enough parts to make something truly personalized. One of the rewards for leveling up faction reputations is blueprints. These offer up a nice baseline with which to tweak vehicles in many different ways. Or, if you’d like, you can build one from scratch, first dropping a frame, and then sticking some tires on it. Maybe put a cabin on top of that. And then guns, lots of guns. Imagination is the limit here, and you’ll be likely to run into a lot of interesting vehicles built by other players.

Graphically, Crossout isn’t a powerhouse, nor is the post-apocalypse traditionally pretty – no matter where it’s found – and ultimately the game does look a bit dated. All that aside, it does seem to be nicely optimized, and it will likely run reasonably well on a wide variety of systems. So Crossout has that going for it. Plus, the game features some nice lighting effects on many of the maps. Most of those are desert-based, but there are missions that take place on in an old, abandoned city, and those are quite pleasing to the eye; who doesn’t love overgrowth.

If Crossout is a game about gathering car parts and weapons and creating a vehicle perfectly personalized to your interests, and then taking that weaponized vehicle out of tours of destruction, then it succeeds on that front, as long as you’re willing to sit through a few hours of grinding before the game really picks up. The most dedicated of players will likely have no problem with this, but the grind alone will likely scare off many others.