CrossfireX: Remedy made a Call of Duty-style campaign for Korea's biggest FPS — and almost nobody noticed

The new milsim Crossfire — built by the team behind the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot and backed by Smilegate — isn't the first singleplayer game to carry that name. A few years ago, Remedy, the Finnish studio behind Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Control, quietly shipped CrossfireX: a pair of three-hour FPS campaigns set in the universe of Smilegate's long-running multiplayer shooter, sometimes called Korea's Counter-Strike.

CrossfireX dropped players into a generically unstable, vaguely Eastern European country as Captain Hall, bouncing between street-level firefights with squaddie companions, obligatory helicopter crashes, and a bullet-time mechanic that could be triggered at almost comically frequent intervals. The campaigns leaned hard into military spectacle — one-liners, melodrama, factions named Global Risk and Black List — with Remedy's trademark narrative subtlety largely absent. There are flashes of craft: a hotel kitchen shootout where bullets send hanging pots and pans swinging is a neat piece of setpiece design. But the overall tone reads less like a Remedy game and more like a studio working within tight genre conventions, delivering badassery to complement the multiplayer rather than a story that stands on its own.

Remedy is best known for bending genre rules — Max Payne's noir monologues, Alan Wake's manuscript-page horror, Control's brutalist SCP-flavored weirdness. Seeing that studio constrained by the Call of Duty playbook is a genuinely strange historical footnote. CrossfireX launched on Xbox in 2022 and was shut down in 2023, which partly explains why it slipped past most players' radar entirely.

With the new Crossfire now promising an evolving emotional connection between its two leads and an innovative cover system, it's worth remembering that Smilegate has been down the singleplayer road before — and that road ended quickly. Whether the new game, built by veterans of one of the most successful CoD reboots in years, fares better remains to be seen.