It’s been a hot minute since the last Crackdown. Nine years to be exact since Crackdown 2, twelve if you purged that game from your memory and only remember the first game. Since its reveal at Microsoft’s 2014 E3 show there’s been a lot of back and forth on what Crackdown 3 even is, and now that it’s out we can confirm it’s mostly just Crackdown 1.5, or if you want to be mean about it then Crackdown 2.5.
Crackdown 3
Developer: Sumo Digital
Price: $60
Platform: PC & Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Narratively, Crackdown 3 takes place some time after the events of the second game over in the city of New Providence. A corporation is threatening to black out the world and you’re sent to cause some trouble. Things don’t go as planned, you gotta fight some bad guys, yadda yadda you know how this goes. You’re not here for the plot, you’re here to smash stuff in chaotic fights with hordes of goons while collecting an absurd amount of orbs. Now while plot isn’t important in this sort of series, personality most definitely is and Crackdown 3 manages to blunder this one up pretty badly.
First of all, the game completely ignores the reveal in the previous games that the Agency was a villainous organization the entire time, with them helping the local militia to overthrow the “corporate scum”. The voice of the Agency director is great, he was always a highlight of the series, it’s just everything else that comes off a bit limp. You work with a rebel whose name is so generic I cannot remember it for the life of me, and if you’ve seen a rebel leader character in any other sort of media then you know what to expect here. The villains leave even less of a mark unfortunately. They’re introduced through a single video introduction and they’ll occasionally pop in to yell at their goons for not killing you, but for the most part they don’t really interact with you. Sumo Digital really dropped the ball here at the opportunity to create some fun, memorable characters but instead opted to just do the bare minimum. Now mind you, they’re infinitely more notable than the ones in the previous games, in which they were practically nonexistent, but just doing the bare minimum shouldn’t be a goal to strive towards.
The world is fairly hit or miss. The island is in a sort of ring shape with various districts segmented from each other and the final area smack dab in the middle. Crackdown is built with freedom in mind so you’re able to go to whichever part of the map whenever you want, but realistically most people will likely follow the ring in order which is a shame because the beginning areas are incredibly bland. It’s just wide open areas with little to no buildings to climb on, and what few are there are small in stature. The final stretch of the ring, when you get to the city proper, is when the city starts to get a bit more personality as the visuals liven up with these hologram signs all over the place, but then it teeters again when you get to the middle section where it’s literally just three massive towers (where the final bosses live) that’s connected by these highways suspended over an acid pit that god forbid you fall into or else you have to climb your ass back up there. To add on top of this, it really feels like the agility orbs were sort of haphazardly placed around the map without any sort of direction or meaning. In the original game you could get into a rhythm of jumping from one orb to the next while here I’d grab one, then have to stop to look around for where the next orb could be, usually on the balcony of a building near the ground level. It’s honestly one of the biggest bummers of this game considering collecting these orbs is what this series is known for.
As a game, Crackdown 3 is still Crackdown. You have your five stats (Agility, Firearms, Strength, Explosives, and Driving) that each level up the more you use them and it’s still a complete joy starting the game with your scrawny little Agent and seeing him evolve into this buff killing machine by the end of the game who’s bounding over buildings. Having your max level agent pick up a tank, then proceed to jump over a building to toss it at some goons on the other side is still just as fun as it was over a decade ago. Crackdown 3 is the series at its best in terms of combat, purely because they just refined what was already there, it’s just such a shame that they didn’t bother to add anything new to it.
Unlike in the previous game where you hunted down the bodyguards to the kingpins to make those tougher fights a little easier, this time around you have a variety of facilities run by the crime bosses that you need to destroy before they reveal themselves on the map. To get the robot Roxxy to appear on the map for example you need to go to monorail stations, kill everyone there, and then repeat that for literally every other monorail station that has the exact same layout until you’ve hit the required quota for her to appear. There are three types of facilities to attack and you’ll run each one the same way because they all have the same layout and enemy setups. Once you realize how many times you’re going to have to repeat the same mission the repetition hits hard and fast. The boss fights themselves are… fine. There are a few that were straight up bad, and the rest are just okay. The only one that was kind of cool was one where you had to fight a boss flying in an airship that flew around the city you were in which was kind of neat. What completely boggles the mind is why they didn’t bother adding some sort of Nemesis System type mechanic to a game that so clearly yearns for it. The page that shows off the bosses you have to take out is even laid out in a similar fashion, just without the utility. It also doesn’t help that in 2017 they previously spoke about having a system in place that was their spin on the Nemesis System, but it was obviously cut from the game for whatever reasons.
This makes reviewing Crackdown in 2019 slightly difficult, because while the game has made no effort to try anything new, it doesn’t change the fact that controlling an agent feels so damn good. This is a hard game to recommend at $60, however it is a great game to recommend if you want to sign-up for Microsoft’s Game Pass for the month to try it out.
We now reach the part of the review where I discuss Wrecking Zone. The physics based destruction mode that’s been hyped up since the game’s reveal. The mode that caused you to hear someone screaming about “THE CLOUD” at every Microsoft show. The mode that’s actually a separate executable from the main game which lends itself to plenty of jokes. Wrecking Zone is as barebones as multiplayer modes come, and honestly probably the most barebones I’ve seen in a very long time. The menu simply has three options: Team Deathmatch, Territories, and an option for selecting your agent. There are no stats to look at, and even when you finish a game it just kicks you back to the main menu instead of starting another round like every other normal multiplayer game out there. Of course, with only two of the most basic multiplayer modes included in this package you’d think the physics based destruction is worth all the wait and I can confidently tell you it’s not.
The promise of cloud powered physics just fails to deliver on practically all fronts, worst of all being that it just adds nothing to the gameplay. The buildings all fall apart with just the slightest tap and there’s no real weight to what you’re doing; that’s not to mention that not all of the arena is destructible, just parts of it and the debris disappears as quickly as it came apart. Add on top of this the world’s sort of Tron-esque aesthetic. It’s a lot less fun smashing buildings apart when they just look like polygons or in some cases have this odd transparent effect on them. Smashing through walls to get to another player doesn’t even feel satisfying because you’re always able to see where an enemy player is through a silhouette which means they definitely know you’re coming for them. The combat itself becomes a game of whoever locks onto the other player first basically wins. Being able to see where the player who locked onto you is coming from is helpful, but there were very few times I was able to quickly turn the tables on them. As cool as the idea of a destruction based multiplayer mode is, Crackdown is just better suited for co-op shenanigans.
The Final Word
Against all expectations, Crackdown 3 managed to survive where others from that same E3 2014 show like Scalebound and Phantom Dust failed to see the light of day, but what we got was just a shinier version of a 2007 game.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 3 out of 5 – Average
