Crackdown 3 is less of a story than it is an anthology of flavor text. Your experience is once again narrated by the Director, reprising his role as faceless gravitas from the first two games (although this time he’s actually given a name). But in other ways, Crackdown 3 is regressive, excising features that appeared in the previous game, such as a wingsuit that allowed the player to glide through the city.Īs in previous games, the narrative framework is paper-thin: You play as a member the Agency, tasked with taking down a criminal organization by working your way up the org chart until you eventually reach Elizabeth Niemand, a Silicon Valley–type mogul who runs all of Pacific City. The only discernible change to the formula is a light strategic element in which playing as different avatars helps different skills level up more quickly: If you know you’ll be doing a street race, for instance, playing as an avatar that earns driving XP 10 percent faster is mildly helpful. Most importantly, leaping across rooftops to collect the series’ iconic MacGuffins, Agility Orbs, still has a compelling “just one more” feel to it. You’re not more than a minute into the game before a group of agents chant the series’ central conceit, “Skills for kills!” Shooting enemies levels up your firearms skill, running them over boosts your driving abilities, and so on. For those unfamiliar, Crackdown is an open-world game where you play as a cop who can leap three stories and has no regard for public safety.
I was pleasantly surprised to find the muscle memory still there, almost a decade later.
#Crackdown 3 review series#
Despite a protracted development cycle - the game was slated for release in 2016 before a series of delays - Crackdown 3 will feel familiar to anyone who has played the first two. Whether Microsoft hit that sweet spot by accident or intentionally, I cannot say.Ī lot has changed since the last Crackdown luckily Crackdown has not.
#Crackdown 3 review download#
Even its download size - roughly 20 gigabytes, far smaller than its big-budget contemporaries, and split into separate launchers for single- and multiplayer - seems designed to cater to a “screw it, I’ve got an hour to kill” attitude.
#Crackdown 3 review full#
I can warn you off of paying full price for Crackdown 3, but I can’t say it’s not worth ten bucks and some free time this weekend. Where once a game like this might have been criticized - for its brevity, its thin premise, and the fact that it won’t hold most players’ interest for more than a couple of days - those qualities now seem like intentional strengths, and a bit insidious. With the latter option in mind, Crackdown 3’s averageness, its B-grade forgetability, seems to herald a new experiment for video games by transposing streaming television’s idea of “good enough” entertainment into the gaming sphere. Now it’s Crackdown’s turn to be the Trojan horse: You can pay $60 to own Crackdown 3 outright when it debuts this Friday, or you can access it through Xbox Game Pass, a $10-a-month subscription service not unlike Netflix. The beta offer was a Trojan horse, helping Microsoft launch a brand-new franchise off the back of an existing giant. Rockstar managed to release Red Dead Redemption 2 last year, setting a new bar for obsessive attention to detail in open-world gaming.īefore that, back in 2007, the first installment in the Crackdown series sold a lot of copies, not because it was any good, but because buying a copy guaranteed access to the multiplayer beta for Halo 3. There have been two more Despicable Me films (three if you count Minions). Since that summer, Obama won a second term, and then we got a new president. Here is what the world was like when the second installment of Sumo Digital’s Crackdown series was released in the summer of 2010: Barack Obama was in the midst of his first term, the first Despicable Me topped the box-office charts, and a scrappy little open-world game called Red Dead Redemption had been released a couple of months prior.
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