Crackdown 3 (2019)

I've never played a Crackdown game before. I had zero interest in the games due to them being exclusives to the Xbox platform. Well, I got Xbox Game Pass to try some new things, and Crackdown 3 called my name.

For those of you who don't know, and that should be nobody at this point, Crackdown is an open-world series where you play an agent running, jumping, shooting, and collecting orbs while you take out objectives on the map and complete missions. As I'm not super familiar with the series, but have played my fair share of open world games, all the missions boil down to you going to a place and destroying something.

To get the baggage out of the way. It's buggy. The driving is so awful you can't really use it to get around easily let along have any chance of not pulling your hair out while doing the challenges. The humour is so, so, so dated and your radio buddies never shut up; either nagging or cracking wise while destruction rains down.

But all of that didn't stop me from beating the story. Because I went in with zero expectations, I had fun. The running, jumping, and dashing are fluid and completely responsive. I wish the driving was half as good as the on foot stuff. Even the glider controls okay; I felt some glider challenges were a little hard to figure out as to why I wasn't getting enough speed, but whatever.

The shooting is a bit weird, but it works. You aim with the right stick and shoot with the right trigger, but the left trigger locks you on to a target. There is no zoom. It reminded me of old 3rd person games on the ps1 when they hadn't standardized shooting controls.

Weapon selection is plentiful and there is a decent variety, but they all boil down to bullets, beams, grenades, and rockets. Near the end I was favouring the rocket and grenade launchers as they tore through everything with extreme ease.

Which brings me to my next point: challenge. On Agent level of difficulty, the standard, it is extremely easy. I felt very little challenge and never really worried about health. The last bosses were defeated in minutes.

Graphics, it's hard to say. The game has a cell-shaded style and the city is cyberpunkish, and I didn't mind the look. The game has interesting locations with its green glowing industrial levels, ramshackle slums, and towering futuristic skyscrapers. There are lots of distinct colours and lighting effects. Due to the 2021 shortage of graphics cards, I haven't been able to upgrade since 2015, so I can't really say how this game looks with everything maxed out, but it has okay design elements that kind of work, but leans closer to a generic western open world game with cell shaded style, and a decent use of colours.

Story wise, you play as Terry Cruise going to Terranova to liberate it from... you know what, the story doesn't matter. You, good guy go in, blow everything up, liberate people, kill an evil corporation person and her other evil colleagues. There's an environmental and anti-corporation narrative throughout the game, but it's hard to take as biting criticism as this is a AAA game made by a giant corporation.

Music, it's really generic and forgettable. Hard electronic beats simply become noise drowned out by explosions. This is an area that made me really miss licensed soundtracks like in GTA and Saints Row. Saints Row 4 blows this game's use of music out of the water. Hell, even GTA 5's orchestrated stuff sticks in my mind after years later. Crackdown 3's music has already left my brain and I finished playing it 10 minutes ago.

I'm not gonna lie; I had fun with this game. I loved jumping around as Terry Cruise collecting orbs, blowing shit up, and turning my brain off. Not only that, but I was able to do that because I had zero invested in this game. I knew I could drop it without a second thought and play something else and never feel guilty. I've got a back catalogue of better games on Steam that I still haven't played, but I finished Crackdown 3 because it was easy.

I don't recommend Crackdown 3 because there is so much wrong with it, and it likely isn't worth your time. But, if you are able to approach it in a way that works like I did, you can still get enjoyment out of it; enough so that you can beat the game -- it's short too!

Crackdown 3 would have been considered a good game, if it was released, say, back in 2010. The graphics are dated, occasionally getting frame skips too which is odd consider the specs I have is way above the recommended, I've had bugs, glitches and a really annoying mouse cursor glitch.

Anyone interested in the game, these are the only paragraph you need to know. Imagine Crackdown 3 is Saint's Row IV but without any of the fun, Saint's Row's 2 graphics and having a lot of annoying gameplay elements or strange map design designs which are just more annoying than fun? Yeah...

50% of the time, you'll be jumping around looking for orbs which not only gets tedious, it steadily gets more frustrating. The rest is just wandering around looking for battles or unlockables. Battles usually consist of the typical kill everything in sight mantra, occasionally forcing you to retreat to a safe area when discovering your weapon loadout is completely wrong for that area.

In summary, for 2019 - everything about this game feels wrong.

Fighting big corporations should be done like this!

[Pre-Read Info]

System: Xbox One S

Play-Time: Little over an hour

Mode Played: Solo Campaign

What should you expect from a game that puts famed movie and TV star Terry Crews in it front and center? An action-packed, non-stop party for one thing. This game completely threw me off as to what my initial thoughts would be. Now I've never played a Crackdown game before, so I made sure to quickly familiarize myself with a lot of things.

So your character has to fight a bunch of corporate shills who are basically kidnapping and brainwashing its citizens. You have to make your way to stop all of their plans and take out their bosses and henchmen. You do this by grabbing some sweet guns, and leveling up every aspect of your character to essentially become a super hero. The world is very open and once you get passed the tutorial area, you are free to explore.

When I got introduced to the leveling system I had thought that it was just a basic stat booster. I was immediately proven wrong because I was introduced into new skills that made exploring and fighting MUCH easier and much more fun. It feels as though there are different surprises around the corner, and I haven't yet gotten bored of getting the collectibles.

Story-wise I didn't focus too much on because I had not played the previous games in the franchise, however I did get into every piece of action I could. This games gives me a good mix of Gran Theft Auto and Borderlands. The pacing is pretty fast so there aren't any long periods of waiting before the next objective appears. There's also a system that saves every car/weapon that you ever pickup, making picking your best load out much less of a hassle.

So far my only gripe is that there are a lot of cut-scenes during the beginning for all of the introductory stuff. On one hand I do appreciate it because it helps someone new to the series like myself get familiar with it. On the other hand, I kept feeling like I was being held back from continuing my path of destruction. At the same time, this was during the first hour so I can't speak for the rest of the game.

During the hour that I've played this game I've had a lot of enjoyable moments. I've found out that my favorite gun is the flamethrower, and my favorite car to drive is the enemies first vehicle you find. I'm having a blast, and this will more than likely be something I play from start to finish.

[Video]

The sandbox formula of jumping around a town, feeling like a super hero but this time! It's badly optimized and this time!! it makes sure to pause and be overredundant with every single little thing you do so that the flow of the game is always a drag. It is the first Crackdown entry I'm playing being that I didn't grew up with an Xbox, and being the first Windows 10 exclusive game I'm playing: This doesn't show a good image on it at all, it is poorly optimized, even if it's an Unreal engine game that should be super fine, it doesn't run that well and often stutters.

The plot... Is very typical, it's not offensively bad or anything, it's your fair share of evil corporation is controlling the city and you gotta liberate it, something I can get behind easily and yet they ruined that simple premise by enlonging it in ways I didn't think it was possible, I'm amazed at how many unnecessary cutscenes Crackdown 3 has, every single thing you do has a little pause. Like a 1 minute exposition about one generic character or boss of a district that I don't even care about, it's not funny, it's not that well written, and the characters never shut up about the most obvious things.

If you were going to not put any effort at all into plot, then stop FORCING IT, seriously you could've saved a lot of budget by just making the missions of liberating the same old places over and over without having to hire someone to draw characters we barely get to see character of. I feel as if there is so much of this game you could've trimmed to be a little bit better, this game was delayed a lot and you could've skimmed the entire pauses from the unncessary characters, and added more mini-games instead.

I give 3/5 to games I've actually hold onto long enough to beat I feel, but this isn't entirely a 2/5 game, I wish grouvee had the option for a 2.5/5 but. Because at first I was going to give this game a 3/5 because clearly some effort was put into it, It's not glitchy neither is it untolerable it's just that it plays it so safe that it ends up being boring to the point I don't wanna play it anymore, and if I had nothing better to play at the moment I would've completed more of the mundane "liberate this spot" missions, I mean my backlog is as big as it already, I just played this because i was like "Oh Crackdown 3 is finally out! I should actually check that out" because this game was DELAYED so much most people forgot about it.

I feel as if Crackdown should've learned a lot from games like Saints Row, which excelled in everything this game has set to do. Crackdown 3 is ironically, not wacky enough and at times feels really boring cuz this formula has been done so much faster and better. Oh and Terry Crews is BARELY there.