Crossroads Extreme

Crossroads Extreme is a fun little game where the idea is to control the traffic and crossing lights in order to keep the pedestrians safe and the cars flowing. That's a cool concept, but is it enough to keep you entertained for thirty stages? Instead of doing our usual reviews, I decided to chat with Friend of Defunct Games, Lorne Riseley, about what I liked and disliked. This is a fun conversation where I show off a few stages and dig into ways the developer can make this game better. So, look both ways before crossing the street, because we're about to play Crossroads Extreme.

Now this is a simple concept: Your is to keep a busy intersection flowing by controlling the traffic and crosswalk lights. It's trickier than it sounds, because the motorists are impatient and will ignore the red light if they wait too long. The same is true of the pedestrians who are just looking to safely walk across the street. The goal is to keep everybody happy by juggling the lights and doing your job.

All thirty stages come with three different objectives. These normally involve you surviving a certain amount of time, letting different types of cars through and keeping track of the pedestrians. These are pretty easy at first, but a lot of the late-game objectives can be time consuming. We'll eventually get to the point where you're dealing with four-lane highways and crosswalks on all sides of the street.

I like some of the later stages, but it's clear that developer IO Games didn't have enough ideas to fill thirty short stages. There are only two types of locations (city and desert), and don't even get me started on how repetitive the vehicles and pedestrians are. Once you've seen the first few stages, you've basically seen everything Crossroads Extreme has to offer. And that's disappointing, because there are a lot of ideas that would have added to the formula. It would have been fun to see you control traffic during an alien attack, crime scene or Godzilla-style monster wandering around.

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And it's not just the obstacles that are sorely lacking, but also a scoring system. It would be fun to see a combo system or vehicles that are worth more points. There's nothing like that here, so once you've completed all the challenges, you're done with the game. There's no reason to keep playing, and that's a shame.

Crossroads Extreme isn't a bad game, but there isn't enough to the concept to keep the game fresh through all thirty stages. Between seeing the same cars, pedestrians and challenges, the levels start to blur together after a while. It's also not as challenging as it should be. There's a good idea buried in this messy action game, but Crossroads Extreme squanders most of its potential.