Crucible ticks all the boxes necessary to conform to the service game climate, including a colorful roster of heroes with diverse abilities, eye-packed cosmetics, dozens of progression-level battle paths, and pieces of lore that hint at a larger world. It appears to check the boxes. Unfortunately, the game wraps these familiar elements in a competitive third-person shooter, and it's not very good at it. Even for a free-to-play game, I can find no reason to stick with the tedious combat and erratic performance.

Much of Crucible feels like a misguided effort, starting with the game modes. Its centerpiece mode, "Heart of the Hive," is a four-on-four race to farm essence (Crucible's experience points) and collect the first three Hive Hearts. The Hive Heart monsters only spawn every few minutes, so teams are encouraged to spend their time capturing the Harvesters who farm the Essence and defeating the weak NPC creatures that roam the map.

Efficient farming is the best way to gain levels over your opponents and gain an edge in the fight, but it's so tedious that you can't blame most teammates for goofing off instead of trying to fulfill their objectives. The map is huge, too big for eight players. Most of the time is spent running around between diagonals in a chaotic jungle waiting for the cooldowns on your movement abilities to run out.

I had a little more fun in Alpha Hunters, the duo-only 18-player battle royale mode in Crucible. The map still feels too large for the number of players, but the action tends to start earlier than in Heart of the Hive. Another oddity is that players who lose a partner can offer to team up with an enemy player and form a duo on the spot. This is a handy gimmick that mitigates the typical BR scenario of losing a teammate in the first five minutes and fighting through the round solo. Most players were willing to pair up if I requested it, but a few took the opportunity to shoot me in the face instead. Not cool.

It's not worth the wait when a big team fight breaks out in Heart of the Hive or Harvester Command (8vs8 conquering mode). The combat in Crucible is slow and the plethora of explosive effects are difficult to read up close. The imposing assault rifles and miniguns sound like they're shooting marbles; neither NPCs nor players react to damage, completely undermining the impact of Drakar's great axe or Shakiri's sword; Crucible's frustrating weapons make it seem like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's bullets hit like supersonic bricks, and I wish they had something close to the rich impact sound.

Most weapons are only effective at medium range and move slowly, so every firefight soon has two people staring at each other while holding down the left click, each trying to drain the other's massive health bar first. The close-up third-person camera feels claustrophobic amid the map's dense foliage and crowded NPC camps. The narrow field of view makes target acquisition unnecessarily cumbersome for agile heroes like Tosca, who can teleport instantly.

Tactically, there are not many options to get out of an uneven fight. Some heroes' mobility is fast enough to disengage in a short time, but others can hunt you down just as quickly and finish the job before you can recover. With no one to heal your allies and few options to dodge the incoming damage, the battle is almost entirely determined by which team has more people. The lack of a dedicated support role (there are a few abilities that can grant shields and share medikits) leaves a noticeable gap in the flow of the battle. It's like playing an Overwatch match with only a damage hero and a tank hero.

The lack of rolls in Crucible is a deliberate choice, despite the many MOBA-adjacent mechanics, such as cooldown management and leveling. The developer, Relentless Studios, wants to avoid the downside of clearly defined roles that "Overwatch" players are familiar with. While we respect the goal, Crucible is role-free in name only. A space tracker with a minigun with a huge hitbox and health pool, Earl is effectively a tank who draws aggro from squishy characters like Southern and Tosca.

It's a shame the Crucible isn't more interesting. I especially love the little botanist robots called bugs, which can plant flowers, attack enemies, and plow an area with poison gas. I also like Southern's bizarre loadout where he has to switch between rifle, shotgun, and throwing knife to reload, although there are some examples of lack of originality, such as Captain Mendoza, who is not a Solider-76 cosplayer, and Ajona, who looks like a Widowmaker, Relentless is enough to make the cast feel unique. The way the character lore is woven into the "crucible" progression system is something more games should steal. In addition to unlockable skins and voice lines, leveling up heroes also unlocks voice logs, gradually revealing their backstories.

One of Crucible's biggest obstacles is inconsistent performance. On my RTX 2060 and Ryzen 5 2600, the game struggles to maintain around 50 fps on high settings. Before updating the graphics drivers, the average was closer to 30 fps. This erratic performance is incompatible with the level of detail in Crucible. Games look good, but not that good. We also encountered some visual quirks that seemed to haunt us regardless of settings, the most jarring of which was a noticeable decrease in animation detail with distance: at distances of 20 meters or more, character movement becomes choppy and almost stop-motion-like; at distances of more than 20 meters, characters' movements appear choppy and almost stop-motion; and at distances of more than 20 meters, characters' movements appear to be more like a "stop-motion" animation. Until these issues are addressed, only mediocre performance will be possible without a high-performance machine.

Unfortunately, even the best crucibles do not have enough appeal to make one long for them. The ingenious heroes have obvious potential, but once I have to actually play with them, my enthusiasm is dampened; there are too many shooters out there that can do what the Crucible can do, and I'm not sure that the Crucible is the right choice for me. That's a big problem for competitive multiplayer games, even if they are free.