Crackdown 3

Crackdown 3 offers an amazing feeling of power with a great selection of weaponry to make use of during chaotic firefights as well a decent looking but anemic world to explore but fails to grow beyond the original dated formula.

Crackdown 3 is probably not the sequel you were looking for, but it definitely has some thrills. Our review...

In an ideal situation, so much isn’t riding on Crackdown 3 to be a huge hit both critically and commercially. The current state of exclusive games on the Xbox One puts an enormous amount of pressure for Crackdown 3 to be something that can stand up to the mega-AAA games Sony has produced in recent years such as God of War, or the beloved franchises seen on the Nintendo Switch.

Crackdown 3 manages to escape its troubled development in style, offering up a somewhat safe return to the superhero cop action of its predecessors in a bright and unpretentious campaign. It feels like the perfect antidote to some of the more bloated open world experiences of recent years. You can also briefly revel in the Wrecking Zone’s glorious destruction, even if all that fancy cloud tech simply leaves you hungry for what the game could have been.

We’ve done our waiting, five years of it! Five years that unfortunately have me questioning if it was all worth it. Admittedly, this is the first Crackdown game I’ve sunk more than a few hours into, so I can’t attest to whether or not it’s the proper follow-up to the original from 2007. The good news is I’ve genuinely had some mindless fun with Crackdown 3 as I’ve leapt across the rooftops of skyscrapers, blasted thousands of goons, and massacred the infrastructure of a vile corporation. However, the colorful world, level of freedom, and even Terry Crews can’t remedy the game’s sense of monoto...

Even with Terry Crews, Crackdown 3 fails to reach the highest agility orbs.

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Crackdown 3 is forgettable, broken in places, extremely short and set in its ways. Still, I'd be lying if I told you I didn't have a hell of a lot of fun playing it.

All these years later, Crackdown 3 delivers on what made the original an enjoyable game, but never much more. Though the compulsive hunt for collectibles can be satisfying for a time, its overall campaign doesn't evolve beyond a mostly bland auto-lock shooting gallery. Its tacked-on Wrecking Zone multiplayer highlights some neat cloud-powered destruction that's never used to great effect in this tiny and woefully barebones mode.

Before you go after anybody though you will want to reclaim some Agency Supply Points, or else you'll keep having to start over from the Agency Tower. The Tower's not so bad - there's the supercar, an awesome drive-over-anything SUV and a truck cab on permanent standby for deployment, along with tunnels to each of the three ganglands - but supply points are nearer to the action, not to mention more, er, vertically exciting. When you're close to one, it shows up on the mini-map and needs to be reclaimed from a token enemy force. Claim it and you can use it to store weapons (any enemy weapon dep...

There's obviously a long and sad story to be told here. The tales of how it swapped development studios, of how it was supposed to be an Xbone launch title, why it never became the promised technical masterwork that made cloud-based processing a part of gaming. It reeks of development hell, as demoralising to play as I imagine it was to make. Yes, clearing a map of its icons can be readily distracting, and it fulfils this role at least. But that's no longer nearly enough. Although I'll say one thing for it, that shouldn't be underappreciated. It's fast travel is fast - it loads anywhere on the...

Crackdown 3’s story shortcomings extend to Wrecking Zone, the game’s multiplayer mode. Wrecking Zone may seem ambitious with its crumbling destructible cityscapes rendered by Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, but it currently only features team deathmatch and a mode where you have to hold a piece of territory, the sort of basic distractions that would have been in a launch game on PlayStation 2 decades ago. Most galling of all: you can’t play with friends in a party, relegating online friends to the co-op campaign. Wrecking Zone is conceptually interesting but lacks staying power.