PlayStation Basement #15 - Crossroad Crisis

This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on December 8th, 2018. It has been edited slightly for formatting.

Welcome back to PlayStation Basement, a weekly series happening every Saturday and dedicated to reviewing odd or obscure games for the original Sony PlayStation. As always, I’ll be using a nine-point scale where 7-9 is Good, 6-4 is Neutral, and 3-1 is Bad.

Since we are nearing the holidays, a time when people often visit their families, let’s talk about a game about a chicken following a road to get home – Crossroad Crisis. Originally titled Chiki Chiki Chicken, the game was developed and published by Success in the year 2000 in Japan as part of the SuperLite 1500 Series (so named for their low price point in yen); the title was brought to North America the following year by A1 Games, who published many other SuperLite 1500 and Simple 1500 games in a similar budget style with often generic names.

The cover art for Crossroad Crisis follows the same style of the other A1 Games budget titles such as Snowboarding, Racing, Battle Hunter, and Board Game: Top Shop. Games in this series feature a color-coded strip and icon across the top to signify the genre of game (such as racing or RPG) along with, usually, the game’s title. This often led to a direct but odd naming convention – is it really “Board Game: Top Shop” or just “Top Shop”? Sometimes the spine even seems to disagree with the cover. Crossroad Crisis, unlike its puzzle counterpart Puzzle: Star Sweep, does not have its name in the top strip, and does not seem to include the genre as part of the title. The actual cover art is bland and does not showcase the important part of the game – the cute baby chicken. Instead, we have a generic cartoon logo surrounded by flying blocks of the road tiles from the game on a light blue background. The Japanese cover art is similarly simple but instead shows our hero straight on the cover along with the maze they need to navigate. The American version is not particularly interesting in comparison.

Thankfully, the graphics of Crossroad Crisis go a little further than the bland cover, though they are still simple. The chicken sprite looks nice, and the road tiles are decent as well. The interface is clean and easy to understand. The most beautiful aspect of the game graphically has to be the colorful backgrounds with their soft, watercolor looks. There are at least 10 background designs, changing each level as the chick journeys to find their family. You also get some cutscenes at the beginning and end that are animated nicely in a coloring book style akin to a simpler Yoshi’s Island.

Crossroad Crisis doesn’t do much with sound. There is one music track and few sound effects. The music fits the game, sounding something like a town theme from an early Pokémon game, but it is still just one song. The sound effects are average as well. Overall, the sound design is fine, but it is nothing amazing or notable.

Unlike Activision’s Freeway, there’s no crossing of roads nor are there cars or other moving obstacles. Instead, this game is a puzzle game akin to Pipe Dream (aka Pipe Mania) or that hacking mini-game from BioShock. Instead of pipes and liquid, Crossroad Crisis has chickens and roads. The road tiles float on water, so all is still right with the world.

The player has to guide the chicken over the tiles with connecting roadways. Tiles can be rotated and moved even if the chicken is on the tile. You can also move multiple tiles if the path is clear, which it usually isn’t as you progress through the 10 levels of the game. The object of the game is to get the exit buoy to appear by removing so many tiles from the map. Tiles count as cleared after the chicken crosses two or more tiles of the same color. They will also vanish from the map once the small bird moves onto another color. There are certainly some strategies here that can get challenging towards the end, but there are no powerups or special items to change things up. There is also versus mode where two players can go head to head to see who gets to their exit first. And that’s it – a story mode of 10 levels (or three levels for training) plus a versus mode.

Crossroad Crisis is fun but seriously short and lacking content. If the developers had added another mode, unlockables, or perhaps just some extra options (like powerups), the game would feel a little more complete. At only 10 levels, the game can be cleared in under thirty minutes, and gameplay stays the same from beginning to end other than the chicken’s speed, the number of tiles to clear, and the starting tiles on screen. It is nice to have an ending cartoon, and it looks pretty nice despite the weird and somewhat creepy ending (you will need to play it to see what I mean). Overall, the single-player mode could use a bit more oomph. With just the basic versus mode to complement it, Crossroad Crisis is a pretty limited package.

For puzzle fans, the game is very cheap, common, and strangely available on the PSN store as a PSOne Classic for PS3, Vita, and PSP.

Crossroad Crisis receives a Neutral (6).

Follow EfreetEater on Facebook