Grief can do funny things to you, even let you open up portals to the land of the dead. Or so things are in Crossing The Line, a hugely ambitious independent shooter that's reaching further and deeper than a two-developer team might be expected to reach. Taking the premise of a downtrodden and grieving chief police detective and giving him the ability to cross between worlds as he investigates his wife's death may not seem immediately challenging, but this is a CryEngine FPS title that is starting to feel like The Darkness with all the comic book trappings stripped out.
Crossing The Line isn't just dark, it's pitch black. There's a lot of promise to the simple and potent backstory to Edward Mason, our protagonist, in this game. While the idea of a tortured soul isn't exactly unheard of, his detective thinking may bring a different take to the idea of crossing between realities than we've seen before. With his wife killed in a terrorist attack there's already a lot of additional baggage brought to this story, not to mention suggestions of alcoholism on Mason's part as he struggles with the loss. Not that such baggage is the most original idea we've ever heard. Husbands losing their wives and getting angry about it seems like something we've seen a fair amount of in our videogames over the years. At the very least, we're expecting a game that treats the core concept with a little more seriousness than we saw in Murdered: Soul Suspect. For one, there's going to be some real consequence to moving between the realms.
How exactly Mason comes to be able to move between worlds we hope to discover as we play, but for now we know it comes at an expense. You'll be able to freely move between the physical world and escaping your body to be in the world of the spirits at certain points in the game. In this state you can still attack enemies, albeit crushing their souls rather than shooting them with bullets. However, staying for any period of time in the world of the dead drains your health, making you more vulnerable. In other words, stay too long among the dead and that's what you'll become too. While it may salve Mason's grief, it won't get him any closer to solving the murder.
Alternatively Mason can ‘crash' the two realms into one another, unleashing the monsters of the other side into the physical world. There's a great benefit to this in that these creatures will start attacking those in your way, however, they'll be just as happy to take a chunk out of you too. It should allow for the kind of variation in play style that we've come to expect from triple-A shooters, embracing all-out action, stealth and now the supernatural too. Not bad for a team of two.
The level of realism achieved with CryEngine by Zomboko is very impressive. The settings revealed so far all feel very familiar and typical, which should make for a fantastic contrast with some of the supernatural creatures and effects that have been revealed so far The additional benefit of working with CryEngine is that it is a great multiplatform base to work from PC and Linux are at the forefront of plans for Crossing The Line at the moment, but next-gen consoles may not be too far behind. And Linux means this could be one of the first games that SteamBox players will get to enjoy on their new consoles.
The Zomboko duo has dug deep already on this project and while it's very early days there's an ambition and scope to Crossing The Line that speaks volumes about their confidence. We've seen games a little like this, but not from so unique a viewpoint or delivered so rich with detail. Some of it seems a little derivative, but we're willing to forgive that for the time being to see how this new indie team shakes out. We're keen to know more about what will be hiding on the other side of this game, but we'll just have to wait. Given the size of this team, we can't see it being fast-tracked to market anytime soon.