Crossfire, announced today at Summer Game Fest’s big opening event, is a new third-person narrative-driven shooter that the devs hope will completely change how cover-based shooters play. After seeing the game earlier this month, I think it very well could. The bigger problem might be getting people to notice what Crossfire is doing differently.
This is the first game from That’s No Moon, a studio created in 2021 by a team of veteran devs who have worked on God of War, Call of Duty, and The Last of Us. And yes, if the name Crossfire sounds familiar, that’s because this upcoming game is connected, in ways that weren’t made entirely clear to me, to the popular, long-running Korea-based online free-to-play Crossfire FPS. But this is a very different kind of game, as can be seen in the trailer released during SGF.
The coolest cover system I’ve ever seen in a game
Crossfire, the new one that was just announced, is a third-person military shooter featuring survival elements and brutal combat. The entire story of Crossfire is built around two characters from opposing forces coming together to survive a situation that neither could take on alone.
I can’t tell you about that situation specifically, but what I can tell you is that while playing Crossfire, you’ll need to be careful as enemies hit hard and death can come in seconds. Gunfights in Crossfire are tense, and you’ll want to stay in cover as much as possible to avoid taking a stray bullet and bleeding out.
And it’s the act of using cover in Crossfire that the studio has spent a lot of time developing.
That’s No Moon laid out how games that currently feature cover systems use a cover system that has been around for decades. You slam into a wall or car or whatever and then pop out using an aim button to shoot enemies. You then exit cover and push forward.
This, the studio argued, limits level designers and artists. It also means you can’t surprise players, as we all recognize combat arenas filled with chest-high walls and, as a result, know when a firefight is coming. More importantly, the devs asserted, that isn’t really how cover works in real-life combat. In actual firefights, soldiers will bend their bodies to organically hide behind any kind of cover, including unusually shaped rocks or trees. And these soldiers aren’t locked into cover but instead can move back to get a shot, move closer to get more protection, or crawl to a larger rock while making sure to stay hidden behind anything they find along the way.
This more methodical and sometimes desperate style of gun combat is what That’s No Moon wanted to recreate in Crossfire.
Using Unreal 5, the devs have created a system made up of hundreds of animations and other techniques to create the most natural, realistic cover system I’ve ever seen. In a demo I was shown of an early level, the character they controlled moved over rocks and around natural objects as if they were a real human trying to ensure that as much of their body as possible was behind something and not exposed to an enemy.
The way the character slinked over some rocks like a snake with a rifle while hunting down an enemy, naturally keeping their body hidden behind larger stones or branches as they went, was so well-done that I felt like I was watching a pre-canned animation from a cutscene. But it was happening in real time. It was impressive, and made firefights look very different than the cover battles I’ve seen in games like Gears of War and The Division.
“Everything in the environment is cover,” said a developer showing off the tech and how it works. The devs also confirmed that this cover system would work in buildings and more urban environments as well. But it really shines in big swaths of nature, which can’t really exist in a traditional cover shooter as you typically need lots of crates, chest-high walls or other such things dotted around an area for combat.
How do you sell a game like Crossfire in the age of clips?
However, while I think the combat looks heavy and very tactical, and the cover system looks like a real game-changer that I expect a few other dev teams might steal in the future, I’m not convinced that what Crossfire is doing is going to be easy to market. At a glance, Crossfire does look like another military shooter. In this era of the internet, which is built on short clips and videos, that could be a problem for getting people to pay attention, even if it has a wildly innovative cover system. It took around 10 minutes of watching them show off the tech and explain it to me before I really understood how cool and unique it actually was.
So I asked the people making the game: How do you promote Crossfire online in 2026? “It will be a grassroots experience,” said game director Jacob Minkoff.
“Part of the answer is you guys. The important thing is to have people talking to each other about the experiences they’ve had. I think there have been a few games that have mechanics that, really, when you play them, feel so different, but maybe aren’t so obvious in a short trailer.”
He suggested that, as folks play the game and excitedly tell their friends or their readers about how different the game feels from other cover shooters out there, that can make more folks curious to try it for themselves and bring them into the experience.
Oh, and I did ask about that other single-player CrossfireX shooter developed by Remedy back in 2022. Taylor Kurosaki, the studio’s chief creative officer, explained that their Crossfire game “stands on its own” and that the team was making its “own interpretation of the Crossfire IP.”
“I’ve always thought how it’s really cool how longstanding and enduring IPs can be reinterpreted over time,” said Kurosaki. “Look at Batman…This is our interpolation of [Crossfire]. It’s really great, Crossfire as an IP gives us the chance to tell a story we’ve wanted to tell for a long time. A story about two sides that are equally right and equally wrong.”
Perhaps the folks at That’s No Moon can sell people on how different their version of a third-person shooter is while also making it clear that this game is its own thing, unrelated to those other Crossfire titles. Maybe this will all work out? I can’t see the future, so I don’t know. But what I do know is that I’m excited to get my hands on Crossfire and check out its adaptive cover system and survival-focused military action when it launches sometime in the future on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
