Crossout

Crossout is a vehicular combat game which features combat, trade and crafting as the main gameplay activities. The basic premise is that you will use crafting skills to create your own vehicles to use during combat and missions which take the form of PvP matches against other players and PvE matches against the game’s AI NPCs.

About the Game

The setting of the game is a post-apocalyptic dystopian future in which both a nuclear war and human genetic testing have wreaked havoc on the population. This has left a world that has some visual similarities with the Mad Max film series. It is also part of the Ex Machina universe. It is set 200 years before Ex Machina and 20 years after a disastrous attempt to build super-soldiers has unleashed a contagion on the world.

Building your vehicle is key and the limits are your imagination. Each vehicle must start with a core pairing of a cabin (which powers the vehicle) and an undercarriage (also known as a frame) or a basic chassis, in other words. From there, and using resources and in-game currency, you can add on or leave off any of the following: armour, weaponry, auxiliary devices and generators – they are all available but not mandatory.

If you make a vehicle that you really love and want to preserve for posterity, you can save the blueprints in case you need to rebuild it at some point.

The Nitty Gritty

There are no set classes or models, so you really can go to town and design your vehicle according to your own needs and preferences. However! You must take the physics engine into account: vehicles that are too heavily loaded will not move, those that are top heavy will tumble over, and those with too much weight in the wrong place will be impossible to steer.

And it’s not only your engineering skills that you should be aware of. Heavy cannon fire can flip the firing vehicle if it’s too light for the recoil, or, conversely, can flip the fired-at vehicle if it hits the right place. This feature stops players from creating impregnable tanks loaded with the maximum amount of heavy artillery, ensuring there is some balance and fairness in the game.

Battles occur in real time, and involve taking out the enemy, capturing their base, or meeting other targets, depending on the rules of the specific mode being played. Your vehicle will keep on going until the cabin is destroyed or damaged too heavily to work. This means that all your peripherals can be shot off without harming your mobility.

However, some of these peripherals will explode when hit, generators and fuel barrels in particular, inflicting an arc of damage around them. For this reason, care must be taken with placing these. When looking at the ranking levels of vehicles, it is based primarily on the guns on the vehicle, not its armour – so a lightly armed, heavily armoured vehicle will seem ‘weak’ in the rankings, despite turning aside heavy artillery.

What Faction to Join?

There are several factions which you can join:

Engineers: everyone starts off here, and you must get to Level 10 before you can choose another faction to switch to. This faction works as the tutorial squad, training up survivors of the plague and providing you with everything that you need

Lunatics: high risk, high rewards are this faction’s watchwords. They fight with buggies, using high-powered brutal weapons like explosives, shotguns and rams, with armour an optional extra. Fast and nippy, Lunatics build excellent scouting vehicles

Nomads: human, but rather lost souls, Nomads are good all-rounders, but they are champions at neither defence nor combat. They like automatic weapons, and to strip downed aircraft for fresh resources

Scavengers: these guys love to rootle through warehouses and military bases – abandoned ones, of course. They will sell anything that still works, and cannibalise broken things for new car parts and accessories. They like heavy defences and equally heavy firepower (they favour cannons), which makes them slow. That is slow but dangerous: when they start coming at you, not much will stop them!

Steppenwolf: members of an elite Brotherhood, these guys tend to be honourably discharged veterans, disgraced agents, or monsters working on avoiding a death sentence. Long-range weapons sniping from a distance are favourite ways to battle, especially when they have cover to hide in while they take care of business

Dawn’s Children: this people managed to avoid the virus by using anti-virus super-suits, and their love of technology extends to their vehicles: military prototypes, plasma weapons and rover pieces are all used by this faction, along with hovers which give them a nice edge in some battles

Firestarters: these pyromaniacs worship everything fiery. Shotguns, flamethrowers and explosives adorn their vintage-looking hot rods. A worthy opponent in any battle!