How one of the lowest rated games of 2020 also has the only queer rep in the Fast and Furious series

The Fast and Furious series is well known, you know that silly series about impossible feats involving cars and broken physics laws and the general idea of "Family".

Now I love that series, I grew up on it, I think it has a lot of missed potential. And one day I will make a queer reading of the whole series. (To do so I started watching the movies with a friend, a feat that will probably take a couple of years since we don't live close by.)

I've also been consuming other related content, specifically Gender Reveal's 2 Trans 2 furious- a zine about the Fast & Furious franchise and also gender, made by 40+ trans writers and artists. And while I haven't finished it yet I can easily tell you this had some of the greatest writing I read this year. Maybe consider getting a copy.

In that booklet one of the pages talks about Cam, the only canonical nonbinary character in the whole franchise, that only exists in the delisted game known as Fast and Furious: Crossroads. Let's talk about that.

Fast and Furious: Crossroads (which I will only refer to as Crossroads from now on) is a game released on August 7, 2020, for Windows, xbox one, and playstation 4. developed by Slightly Mad Studios, and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment.

It was immediately hit with absolutely negative reviews (or as wikipedia puts it “generally unfavorable”), the game was so bad that Bandai Namco delisted it from all platforms by the end of April 2022. (no official reason was actually given but it is fair to assume that it played a part).

If you google “worst rated games of 2020” you will stumble upon several websites with varied lists, while the position of the game changes, Crossroads is always on that list.

On the date I am writing this (september 2023) if you go on steam you see that the game is unavailable, and surprisingly the reviews are mixed and not bad, the surprised decepets when you see that a lot of “positive” comments are something along the lines: “I was going to leave this a negative review. But you don't do that to family.” (quote from steam user Lord Bork).

This is how I found it a couple of weeks ago, and my curiosity beat me. I (through some alternative means- if you know what I mean) downloaded the game to see exactly how bad it is, and on a more personal note, how the nonbinary representation stands.
(shoutout to the one person seeding this game in the year 2023 you are the love of my life).

(as copied from steam): “Caught up in a dangerous world of organized crime, three small-time garage owners find themselves at a crossroads. In a quest for vengeance, their destinies collide with a cast of familiar faces who share the same adversary.”

The game’s plot is actually set in the movie timeline, between the 8th movie (the Fate of the Furious) and the 9th movie (F9), with some connection to Hobbs and Shaw (a spin off that I don’t remember anything about even if I am sure I watched it) It is a sort of a bridge game.
All of this to say, the plot is canonical due to being somehow connected to stuff that happened before but also since it's a fast and furious game, it doesn't matter.

I will not break down all of the plot, mostly because I forgot all of the details the second I finished the game and nobody else on the internet cares enough about this game to write a synopsis. But I will explain some of it in the next section.

start before you even download it, being over 80 GB in size, for a short, linear campaign, with no freemode option, and a side multiplayer mode that nobody ever played- it is not fun.
At launch crossroads cost 60$. Spoilers for the rest of this section- the game is not worth 60$.

You start the game, as our favorite bald man- Dominic Toretto- voiced by Vin Diesel. Only to be confronted by prompts for an xbox gamepad. I am playing on pc, so that’s a bad start. I plug in my PS4 controller, it doesn’t recognize it, I open DS4windows, it doesn’t recognize it, I open steam big picture mode, THE GAME DOESN'T RECOGNIZE THE CONTROLLER.

Okay no controller, why are the prompts for an xbox controller then? going to the settings reveals that that is how the game is, the controls setting does not show you keyboard binds anywhere. In fact the only place the game acknowledges that a keyboard should exist is in the menu, which does have the correct button prompts. This is such a lazy port.

(After finishing the game I checked out gameplay for the ps4 version, it had ps4 button prompts, but can you imagine how funny it would be if it also had xbox prompts as well.)

Fine, using the internet it is, I found a steam forum post with the button list given out by a user which then added “I think I randomly hit the handbrake and rear view keys a few times but haven't bothered to find which keys they are.” which is so fair my guy. There might be secret buttons pc gamer will never discover for this game.

So we can finally start the game! You, Dominic Torreto, and your friend Letty Ortiz (voiced by Michelle Rodriguez <3) are chasing some criminal who is plot significant to some degree. After flipping some enemy cars, a bigger car starts using a flamethrower on you, at that point you are prompted to switch characters, and you discover each car has a special ability, Letty’s current car is a harpoon, which you need to mash F in order to pull fuel tank of the big fire-y car.

I am sure making me do a task while I am driving, using a button that is so close to the driving buttons, will not prove to be annoying… anyway

After that mission you meet Vienna Cole (voiced by Sonequa Martin-Green) and Cam Stone (voiced by Asia Kate Dillon). Cam uses they/them pronouns, making them the only nonbinary character in the franchise, I will elaborate about it later. Together they work as vehicle recoverers in Barcelona. They also live together.

Here the next major problem of the game happens, most of the cutscenes just didn’t work for me! They would start fine, freeze, and after the time the cutscene should have played for passes, the next gameplay scene would start. Sometimes the cutscenes would just skip completely, and the only reason I noticed it’s because there was a jump in the story that made no sense otherwise. In order for the game to make sense I played with “FAST & FURIOUS CROSSROADS All Cutscenes (Game Movie) 1080p 60FPS HD” opened on my phone so I could watch the parts that did not work. I don’t think I need to tell you this is a bad gaming experience.

So you meet Vienna’s boyfriend, who got involved with the local mob, and will die in like 3 missions. You also find out Vienna hasn't raced since “something” very bad happened the last time she raced, and that’s why she (and notably, Cam, who had nothing to do with that) fled from Miami (and the USA at large) to barcelona.

The gameplay is often criticized for being boring, and while I don’t disagree, I don’t think it’s that bad. The world sometimes tries to trick you into thinking it is an open world but it is dreadfully linear. Most objectives are “get from point a to b”, without there being anything really to make that a challenge. To the merit of the game, all of the drives are filled with well paced character chatter, the dialogue isn’t great but at least it’s fitting the format.

The dialogue would become a problem only if you have to repeat certain sections over and over again, and I am sure that doesn't happen often - haha.

After like the midpoint of the game, at which point I wasn’t sure you could fail a mission, I started failing missions. Some because, well, sometimes you lose, some because the instructions of what I need to do are unclear, and some because of missions I am not sure how the game wanted me to be able to clear any faster. So I had to hear the same lines again and again and again and again.

Also remember that there are cars with special abilities? Let's talk about the worst one.
Cam is a hacker, that is part of their trans swag. So they can try hacking enemy cars. and when you do you get a dead by daylight style minigame, like a circle that has a little colored part in it moving around and when it reaches a glowing section you need to click it.
Who the hell told the developers that the best minigame to put in a driving game where I need to look at where I drive, is one where I need to stare at a circle instead, depending on the difficulty you’ll need to do it up to 3 times in a row. and if the car you're hacking gets out of your line of sight well bad luck bucko you failed the hack now wait for your cooldown.

So near the end of the game you, as Dom, get missile launchers mounted on your car (one of the better abilities in the game), which you use to shoot at a nasa-esc space rocket, since it has a satellite on it with a device that will disable all american technology… or something along those lines.

The rocket topples over. and you (Dom, Letty, Vienna, and Cam) race the rocket as it zooms on the ground on its way to crush into a city. you switch between the characters to use their special powers to slowly disassemble the giant rocket.

it’s kinda annoying, on a certain part I kept running out of time, several times I managed to do the thing the game wanted me to do at the same time as the “ran out of time” scene was supposed to play, so I would hear “great job!” as the game reset the section.

To make it more fun I decided to read this whole thing as foreshadowing for the fact that in F9 they send a car into space. just a bit of a build up from here to space.

You stop the rocket, get a scene of Dom telling Vienna and Cam they are part of the Family now, and the game ends.

Well, there isn’t any- multiplayer that is, not complains. The game mode exists, several game modes exist actually, but by looking at the comments it is clear that even at launch there was nobody online. You need 9 players for a match, good luck finding one.

I even found some comments talking about having special groups to find enough people to play the game, mostly in order to complete the achievements. Props for the dedication.