Crackdown 3
PC, Xbox One
The story of Crackdown 3’ s development will one day be told, and it’s a copper-bottomed guarantee that it’ll be more fascinating than the game itself. Whatever happened, surely this isn’t what was planned. Crackdown 3’ s one big idea – its vaunted cloud-based realtime destruction – adds little to a limited and weirdly generic multiplayer mode, while the singleplayer campaign seems to have settled for even less. It’s Crackdown, but in higher resolution and with improved draw distance, and only the least demanding of players could realistically be fully satisfied with that. For better and worse, Crackdown 3 almost entirely ignores the way the open-world genre has evolved in the 12 years since the original. It doesn’t feel as if it’s been developed in a bubble so much as a time machine.
This throwback approach has its advantages. There’s a single-mindedness to Crackdown 3 that taps into a similar brand of immediate gratification to the EDF games, though it’s less ambitious and spectacular in the scale of its mayhem. But it hardly stints on the carnage. By the end of the game, when you’re picking up vehicles and throwing them into explosive tanks to destroy clusters of robot guards, it feels like almost everything around you is on fire – usually including yourself.
Until then, your job is simple: as a super-powered agent, you’re asked to liberate the gaudy, gleaming city of New Providence from villainous megacorporation TerraNova. In doing so, you’ll expand your own territory, opening up supply caches and fast-travel points (for once that isn’t false advertising; you’re spirited there in moments). Whether you’re freeing civilians, capturing monorail stations or destroying industrial plants, it tends to involve keeping your finger pressed down on the right trigger, pausing only occasionally to dodge a hot laser beam or a boulder hurled by some mechanical brute. It helps that you don’t really have to aim: the lock-on doesn’t always prioritise threats well, but it attaches itself to targets like a limpet, letting you bounce and roll around to your heart’s content, as their health bar quickly drains to nothing.
Each mission contributes to the downfall of a local lieutenant. There are a few mandatory quests and many more optional ones, but it doesn’t take much to draw out and eliminate these mini-bosses, moving you up the chain of command. But while, say, Mafia III or Shadow Of Mordor had you completing dozens of copy-pasted quests over the course of several hours, you’ll expose TerraNova’s kingpins much more quickly: Crackdown 3’ s action may be similarly one-note, but at least it doesn’t feel the need to drag things out with arbitrary level gating. Each objective has a survival rating, determining your chances of success, but progression is permanent – die and it’s a short trip back to the frontline where you can carry on where you left off. You might be too underpowered in the early game to tackle some of these,
but after a short while you’ll have sufficient firepower to give them a shot. That’s certainly true once you’ve got your hands on the pulse beam, a ludicrously powerful high-capacity laser that can cut through almost anything with ease. With a few exceptions, you’ll rarely feel the need to switch, especially with a portable ammo field equipped to your grenade slot – though that’s hardly necessary given how many supply crates you’ll find in and around your objectives. Progress is swift, then, not least since your abilities are upgraded automatically through play. There are no skill trees to think about; unlocking a doublejump and a ground-pound, new weapons, grenades and vehicle types all comes organically. Up to a point it depends on your playstyle – if you use guns rather than melee attacks then that’s what you’ll unlock soonest, but you’ll steadily gain experience in the others regardless. It does, however, pay to take a bit of early time out to grab those green agility orbs. By the time you’ve got a couple of hundred, you’ll be able to clear mid-sized buildings in, well, a couple of bounds. Good job, too, as traversal is otherwise slightly sticky. Sidling along ledges and leaping between handholds is bizarrely slow, but necessary at prisoner hardpoints and vehicle lockups where you need to follow cables to batteries powering the energy gates that contain your targets.
Still, these are the only points where you feel a sense of connection to this pretty but synthetic world. Bodies and vehicles might be sent flying by the force of its explosions, but every major structure is untouched. That’s disappointing enough, but the multiplayer – developed separately by Elbow Rocket, and which does feature the cloud-powered destruction engine – is an even bigger letdown. There are two modes: a version of COD’s Kill Confirmed, where the first team to collect 25 medals from downed enemies wins, and Territories, a bog-standard King Of The Hill variant. While you can destroy certain walls and floors, the foundations of the buildings here also remain intact. And given that it borrows the campaign’s mechanics, the outcome of any shootout is almost always determined by which player locked onto their rival first. Deploying your single bonus ability – a vertical boost or a temporary shield – occasionally lets you escape death, but as a tactic it’s only useful if your opponent hasn’t done the same.
The flimsiness of the multiplayer casts a harsher light on the campaign’s brevity. At around 12 hours, Crackdown 3 might respect your time, but in its lack of ambition, it’s hard to argue that it’s worth the money – you could say it’s the perfect advert for Game Pass. We’d be lying if we pretended we didn’t have some fun with it. But it only works in the same way a McDonald’s occasionally hits the spot: this is cheap, junk-food gaming that comes with a side-order of regret.
Almost entirely ignores the way the openworld genre has evolved in the 12 years since the original