It’s been a long wait for Crackdown 3. Delays can be a positive thing, offering developers time to refine and polish a game. In other cases, it can result in what feels like a dated experience. Crackdown 3 firmly falls in the latter category, offering some amusement but little in the way of interesting new ideas or fun things to do. It’s large and bombastic, with plenty of chaos and collateral damage, but few redeeming values–like a video game version of Man of Steel.
You play as a superpowered member of The Agency who is sent into a city to dispense justice as you systematically eliminate the comically evil members of a nefarious evil corporation. You start out relatively weak but progressively grow in power, jumping higher and gaining the ability to perform ground pounds, pick up and throw increasingly heavy objects, and so on. Enemy factions are responsible for certain aspects of the criminal operation, such as manufacturing a sort of poison, and taking them out weakens that area and makes your ultimate goal of taking down the big bad leader more feasible. There will be collateral damage along the way that is frowned upon–kill too many innocents, and a local militia puts up a halfhearted effort to put you down–but is soon forgotten. Yes, I’m describing Crackdown 3, not its 2007 progenitor.
Click To Unmute
Genshin Impact "Memories of This Life" Animated Short
The First Descendant | Meet Ines | Character Trailer
FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH | PC FEATURES TRAILER
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition — The Year is 2054 Trailer — Nintendo Switch
Horses 2025 – Cinematic Trailer
Monster Hunter Wilds – Open Beta Test 2 Announcement Trailer
Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode – Release Date Trailer
Marvel Rivals Season 1: Eternal Night Falls | Official Trailer
New VIRTUA FIGHTER Project – Pre-Development Gameplay Concept Video
Share
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
Sign up or Sign in now!
Please use a html5 video capable browser to watch videos.
This video has an invalid file format.
00:00:00
Sorry, but you can’t access this content!
Please enter your date of birth to view this video
By clicking ‘enter’, you agree to GameSpot's
Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy
Now Playing: Crackdown 3 Quick Video Review
It would be fine for this to feel so familiar if the action itself were more engaging. The core of collecting orbs (to level up your agility and jump height) and wreaking havoc remains enjoyable, but it isn’t strong enough to make up for Crackdown 3’s numerous shortcomings. From the moment you gain control of your character, it’s hard to shake the sense that this doesn’t feel like a game from 2019. Draw distance aside, the visuals are underwhelming, leaning too heavily on recreating the simple cel-shaded look of past Crackdown games. The one technological advancement the game has to boast about–large-scale destruction, powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud servers–is reserved entirely for the online Wrecking Zone mode, which uses mode-specific maps rather than letting you blow up parts of the city itself. There’s no meaningful destruction in the campaign, and the end result is a world that feels lifeless, as if some key element of it is missing.
The game’s opening takes place in a small area of the city and lays out the basic structure of your goals: Take over a particular boss’s various bases to locate him or her and then complete a boss fight, which, in most cases, is a pretty standard encounter where the enemy has more health than usual. This tutorial is somewhat of an off-putting start; for a game about freedom and doing badass superhero things, you’re stuck in a tightly confined area, underpowered, and tasked with a goal that entails killing some enemies and then removing a pair of batteries powering a propaganda station. Before long, the game opens up and you’re given access to the full city and a wider selection of objectives to tackle, at which point there’s some hope that the newfound freedom and variety will provide the excitement that’s lacking in this early area.
The problem is, what you do in that opening section is representative of the entire game; there’s very little variety to speak of. Ostensibly, each of the different factions presents its own unique challenges and objectives for you to complete. Yet it quickly becomes apparent that what distinguishes them are only surface-level details. No matter the faction, you’re always mindlessly shooting an endless wave of foes as you work your way toward objective markers. Once you’re there, you’ll usually hold a button. Sometimes you’ll have glowing targets to shoot. For a certain objective, you have to shoot a piece of machinery or throw a rock underneath it (always two times) to destroy it. After multiple hours of this, the action begins to bleed together. All of these bases you complete are just another box you can check off the to-do list, rather than a satisfying challenge you look forward to dealing with. I suffered a crash midway through the game that might have resulted in me losing some small amount of progress, but with how same-y many of the objectives are, I honestly wasn’t sure if I was repeating one I had already completed. One of the major criticisms of the original Crackdown was a lack of things to do, and while there might be more here on paper, far too much of it feels like filler, rather than worthwhile missions.
Interesting enemies could have made these rote objectives more exciting, but they too suffer from a lack of diversity. There are different archetypes with their own attack patterns, but they do little to shake up the action, even if some do fly, have shields, rush at you, or pilot mechs. Snipers, due to the heavy damage they inflict, were the only enemies that prompted me to break from my otherwise uniform approach of attacking whatever was closest to me. Weapons have certain types of targets they’re more or less effective against, but certain guns are so powerful that I found little need carefully evaluate what I was using. You move from one objective on the map to the next, hold down the trigger to lock on to enemies, hope it picks the target you want (not always a given), and then blast away. Come from Sports betting site VPbet
And that’s okay. Crackdown 3 isn’t a game where you should need to carefully consider your loadout and the precise manner in which you need to approach a fight; you’re supposed to be a superhero who can dominate whatever is in front of you. But the combination of stale objectives and cannon-fodder enemies makes combat mindless and, at times, even boring, which is strange for a game filled with explosions and enemies flying off of rooftops. If you were to chart the excitement of playing through the campaign, there would be few peaks or valleys; it’s just sort of a constant white noise, like you’re taking a weed wacker at whatever is in front of you. It’s not until much further into the game that you gain the weapons (like a gun that creates black holes) and high-level abilities (like being able to pick up and throw tanks) that make combat more entertaining. By that point, the repetitive goals and encounters have long since become stale. Making your way up the skyscrapers that serve as headquarters for the final few bosses provides some of the only memorable combat sequences, but these only serve to emphasize how rote so much of the game is otherwise.
it’s just sort of a constant white noise, like you’re taking a weed wacker at whatever is in front of you
Outside of the core objectives, there is some fun to be had. Stunt rings that require you to drive a vehicle through them are an amusing challenge, even if the solution is often to rely on your transforming vehicle’s ability to jump into the air. (Your Agency car can be summoned at almost any time and transforms into various forms, which is a cool concept that’s spoiled by the poor driving controls that make it feel like you’re riding across a sheet of ice.) Rooftop races that have you going from checkpoint to checkpoint on foot, often by leaping from one building to the next, are a thrill. Likewise, climbing puzzles that have you ascend tall structures make for a chest-pounding activity. Just be sure to do those as soon as you meet the recommended agility level designated on the map; wait too long, and the satisfying rush of landing a difficult jump is gone due to your ability to skip obstacles with massive leaps.
Co-op multiplayer improves things across the board, letting you race against a friend and engage in general shenanigans. The old Crackdown standby of picking up someone driving a car and throwing it–whether to help them reach a distant goal or simply to doom them–is a hilarious way to interact with another player, and it’s nice that rooftop races can be a competitive activity. But all of this only masks the underlying problems of the game; the action is just as repetitive, and I found myself wishing my partner and I had something worth doing together. Still, co-op is easily the best way to play the campaign.
Wrecking Zone, Crackdown 3’s competitive multiplayer component, brings in the much-hyped cloud-powered destruction elements–but little else. There are two different 5v5 modes available: Agent Hunter, where you kill enemies and collect badges they drop to score points, and Territories, where you capture and hold zones to score points. Much like the campaign, neither mode brings anything new to the table, relying on the gunplay and destruction to do all the heavy lifting. What you see in your first few matches is repeated ad nauseam, with little variety.
Rather than requiring players to freely aim, Wrecking Zone allows you to target enemies by holding a lock-on button that works even at long range. Doing so alerts the enemy to your position, but because this lock-on can be maintained so easily, securing a kill rarely feels enjoyable or as if you’ve truly earned it. It also means that deaths are often frustrating because they tend to be the result of someone spotting you first from an angle where it’s difficult to break their line of sight. One-on-one duels amount to two players holding down their respective triggers and jumping around each other to little effect, due to the sheer strength of the lock-on; at that point, it’s just a matter of who began firing first or if someone has to reload mid-fight. The end result is combat that’s never truly satisfying.
Destruction is Wrecking Zone’s lone standout feature, but it’s underutilized. Technically speaking, it’s impressive, and the spectacle of watching buildings crumble is delightful. However, there tends to be the slightest of delays between when you’d expect that crumbling to begin and when it actually does, presumably due to the fact that this destruction is being processed by the cloud, rather than on your console. It’s a nearly imperceptible wait, but it’s enough to cause a feeling of disconnect with what’s going on. Despite that, blowing things up is the most enjoyable part of Wrecking Zone, which makes it frustrating that it’s not tied directly to what you’re tasked with doing. There are times where you might be able to destroy a floor or wall to expose an enemy’s position, but far more often you’re better off repositioning yourself. Destruction tends to feel like an incidental event, rather than something that is a core aspect of gameplay. Because of that, Wrecking Zone is at odds with the one notable thing about it; your best opportunity to appreciate the destruction is to remove yourself from the action and hope no one comes to bother you as you blow things up.
Leaping high through the air across rooftops and collecting orbs–which still feature one of the all-time great sound effects–is fun and rewarding, because that pursuit has a direct correlation to further improving your jump height. Lifting large objects and chucking them at foes is likewise an entertaining alternative to typical gunfights. Just like in its predecessors, these two superpowers are the primary source of what entertainment there is to be had in Crackdown 3. But it soon becomes apparent that the game has little new to offer beyond cool destruction tech that never gets put to good use. It certainly delivers on letting you blow things up and jump around the city. However, a dozen years after the first Crackdown offered that same experience but failed to provide you with enough interesting content surrounding that, it’s truly disappointing to see this latest iteration suffer from the very same problems.
I feel like I could re-run last year's editorial on the PlayStation Experience keynote, minus the bits about how it was a bold decision for the company to throw its own event (it's a still a smart one, but now it's not new.)
This year's PlayStation Experience keynote presentation saw the company blasting through game announcements left and right; it was like last year, but more so. Sony's presentation was peppy, full of games, and fully fan-oriented.
As in Las Vegas in 2014, so in San Francisco in 2015 — the company has the stage to itself (quite literally, as compared to an event like E3 or Gamescom) so there was no posturing. It was figuratively true, too — at l…
Indie developer Ruckus Games recently secured $19 million in funding for its unannounced debut project. Come from Soccer 13 pools and matches
Two years ago, the studio secured $5.5 million in a round led by Transcend Fund to build its "high-quality prototype." This new round was led by Krafton, with additional contributions from Transcend, BitKraft, and Hypergryph.
In its statement, Ruckus highlighted that prototype as proof its development costs "remain much lower than triple-A, while the team still delivers that same level of quality and fun of titles with exponentially bigger budgets."
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S would be the first consoles to support both Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision. This is exciting news, for the first-time, developers can deliver the full range of depth of content as it was created in the studio. Higher dynamic range, and deeper immersion brings full authenticity to the games we'll see in these next-generation consoles.
A quick review for those of you not familiar with Dolby Atmos, it’s a spatial audio technology that places the sounds of the game all around you with three-dimensional precision, overhead, behind and below. Come from
The 2016 Game Developers Conference is just around the corner, and today organizers would like to let you know two things: Come from Soccer 13 pools and matches
1. Passes are still available, so get yours now!
2. The Indie MEGABOOTH Showcase is back at GDC for the third year running, and today we have the full list of games that will be playable in the MEGABOOTH by all GDC passholders (from Expo to All-Access) at various points during the March 14th-18th week of GDC 2016.
The Indie MEGABOOTH Showcase is a collection of independent developers banding together to show off the l…
With GDC Europe 2015 less than a week away and the session schedule finalized, conference officials have taken the liberty of highlighting a collection of can't-miss sessions for the event.
Online registration for GDC Europe 2015 will close today, July 29th at 23:59 PM ET. If you miss your chance to register online before the window closes, you'll have to pay extra to register onsite.
GDC Europe will take place next Monday and Tuesday, August 3rd and 4th at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany — just ahead of (and co-located with) the massive gamescom trade fair, with all GDC Europe passes also guaranteeing entrance to gamescom.
Hollywood trade magazine Variety reports that Xbox Entertainment Studios, the arm of the company which was developing programs based on its game lineup and original shows featuring TV stars, is no more. According to Variety, former CBS exec Nancy Tellem and the rest of her team have been let go, despite an expectation that they'd have the rest of the year to finalize the fate of the studio's projects Come from Soccer 13 pools and matches . Tellem was hired in 2012 to helm the division; the company made the decision to wind down Xbox Entertainment Studios after Satya Nadella became the company's new CEO and re-focused …
