CrossKrush Review

A long time ago I booked an apartment in Sydney whilst I was visiting the city, it looked really nice inside, it stated it was very close to the many things I would end up visiting and seems fine to look at from the outside. When I got to Australia and made my way to the central location where this apartment was I discovered it was on a freeway and also located under another, it didn’t look great. Thankfully, it was practically noise free inside and was close to everything I wanted to see, so looks can be deceiving. Imagine having a quiet home life to then discover a freeway has been built outside your home, well that is what happens in CrossKrush.

You can play as elderly Henry or Florence in CrossKrush, a couple who now have a freeway outside their home and they are not happy about it. Previously they lived a quiet and harmonious life, but now the sound of vehicles flying down the freeway outside has ruined it and they are going to do something about it. You are tasked with defending your home by blowing up cars or hitting them with your cane, it’s surprising how much damage a cane can cause. Vehicles come in waves and the idea is that you destroy them before they reached the crosswalk. For every vehicle you blow up you get points, the more vehicles you blow up together, then the bigger the bonus, however watch out for ambulances, obviously you don’t want to blow them up.

Each stage is broken up into 10 waves, luckily if you die or mess up you can restart a wave. In the corner, it tells you how many moves you have to do it in to get the best score. CrossKrush acts like a puzzle game because you have to select a specific grid square which turns green, then you are meant to wait for the vehicle to go the square then you can blow it up. The TNT vehicles when blown up will blow up surrounding cars whilst the white vans when blown up highlight surrounding squares in green that can also be blown up, useful for combo scores. You can also use your cane, but be careful you can be run over by these vehicles. After one wave finishes another starts automatically and that is pretty much it with CrossKrush, you simply survive the waves.

CrossKrush is a very simple game, the ability to create your character gives a false sense that CrossKrush has more interactivity when you start but it doesn’t. Run up the road, select a grid square, turn it green, wait for a car to go on it, blow it up and repeat. As the stages progress more lanes and more cars get involved, but it plays practically the same. There are a few power-ups such as a laser gun, something that makes you larger and also health points, but they don’t really change your tactics much. There are 5 difficulty levels, the hardest, resulting in one hit kills for you and also the ground remaining damaged if a car blows up meaning you can’t reselect that grid square until it fixes itself. The hardest difficulty definitely makes CrossKrush more challenging, but you can easily replay waves so it’s not that much of an issue.

Graphically CrossKrush is pretty basic looking, the initial create your character mode has some simple design choices, but the rest of CrossKrush is just a road and a few vehicle types that repeat. Musically CrossKrush goes for an upbeat jazz score, which intertwines well with the many explosions you will be setting off. Once you’ve got through the ten stages in CrossKrush, there’s not much to do, there is a local co-op play, but outside of local high scores there is no need to go back and replay CrossKrush unless you are looking to get the perfect score.

CrossKrush is a simple puzzle game where you blow up cars, there is not much more beyond that. The lack of road types, vehicle types or obstacles make the CrossKrush experience a repetitive one which is a shame. There are definitely several areas which could be easily improved upon, but as it is right now CrossKrush is not quite a crushing playthrough but a fairly unchallenging boring walk across a quiet cul-de-sac.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Playstation 4 code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.