Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Developer: Sumo Digital, Elbow Rocket, Reagent Games
Platform: Xbox One, PC
Genre: Sandbox Open-World Shooter

"Quack, quack motherf***er" that was the only line I've adored from the opening of the game before it tumbles just like the ship with all of the agents. Crackdown 3 has a rough history of development. It's big reason of existing other than indulging power fantasies of obscene amount of explosions was to test Microsoft's cloud based computing.

It sucks for me because there was so much this game needed to fix as well as be filled up with more stuff to do. Most have claimed this is a 7th gen remaster game rather than a full 8th game. Well they could be half-right about that because a lot feels amiss surrounding this title. I mean a lot of people have already reviewed this to no stoppage so I thought "hey, here's my take on this".

I've had little fun but am not looking forward to remembering this game and maybe get to the tail end of how a partnership with Microsoft from the original creators got sour before Epic hired them later on and Sumo Digital picked up the slack.

Story

If you've played the original Crackdown, then you know who the Agency are. They're somewhat of heroes going toe to toe with the baddies but at times the story isn't clear whom are good or bad. There's more of a grey area smeared.

It is set 10 years after the original game and takes you to New Providence, a prosperous but sinister city under the control of a corrupt corporation named TerraNova which survived the worldwide massive blackout. Commander Jaxon played by Terry Crews takes his rag-tag group of agents to do the usual "save the world" schtick before their ship got blown to smithereens and months later, they were revived by an insurgent group led by Enakshi Swift. But all your powers are gone so to get them back, you'll have to collect orbs(of which feels like a ridiculously tacked on subplot but if it works, it works).

There isn't much to tell regarding story as its some generic good guy vs bad guy plot with a twist in the end. Like John Carmack once said "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important".

However I do like how heinous the evildoers are, like they don't have to hide it. They're so transparent and up in your face, you can't help but kind of relish it. They're better than the good guys whom only yaps at your ear and nothing much else. The old narrator from previous Crackdown returns and he doesn't seem to make things much better either. Though cheesy quips and anecdotes notwithstanding.

Gameplay

This is Crackdown 3.0, because the formula is pretty same much there. Big difference is it is a lot more polished and allows you to be more versatile. Although not without its set of problems much like the older games.

Basically you lock on enemies and shoot them with variety of weapons and throwing objects or grenades onto them. It's a bit simple except when explosions and physics is involved, it gets crazier. This is a bona-fide Crackdown game to the teeth. You have all sorts of weapon to choose from with different properties and damages. Heck, there's one that opens a vortex that sucks everything before they explode. Pretty insane. Others can light up combatants in flame, freeze them up or poison them. It isn't short of ideas when it comes to blowing enemies up or breaking them apart, however, if a great game was that simple then there needn't be said anything to convince you otherwise. Unfortunately for this, it isn't.

You jump and dash, as you progress further with upgrades. Your tendency to do both increases just so you could reach higher areas.

The game's mission structure is dull. All you have to do is free civilians, blow up reactors, take down garage of police vehicles etc. All just for capturing bases before getting close to eliminating lieutenants of the major bad guy running the show. Of which the system is based on Shadow of Mordor to be exact. It can lead to fun, glorious moments but they fizzle out because of how shallow and dull it gets over time. Freeing civilians or capturing bases do get you perks like turrets to defend you when attacked or rebel militias stalling enemies while you fight them from the rear while capturing their base. These are nice touches but they don't come around when you want them to at times.

Enemy types comes in many forms from soldiers to guys with armor to robots to big giant mechas and then it flips the coin when it throws in specialists that can warp from one place to another, some that deploy healing stations and heck even an army of snipers you have to dodge continuously. It's ridiculous of how the scale goes. But I kind of wish they brought the mutants from CD 2. It would really have spiced combat up even more considering how crazy the pacing would be. You steer up trouble in streets, you have enforcers of three kinds chasing you. Although it forces you to just hide while everything cools down even though there's no proper way of that doing so.

Of course, for you to overcome these battles: you'll have to level up by collecting orbs, shooting enemies, exploding stuff up, doing fancy car skills and punching your foes to death. It's yearning at first because you start from really nothing but short of muscle. But the fun does ramp up because you're doing so much to ante up the violence.

Doing extra activities like running speed course and timelap races gets you extra orbs too depending on what medals you earn from but this area is also lacking as there's very few of these. I even had ideas like you could race against other cars, blow up stuff as much as possible to rack up points or maybe some silly like throwing a goal-oriented object in a timer for medals. Stuff like that. Anything to drive away the mundane experience.

And that's one way to wrap it up, you just don't get much else once all said and done. Did I forget to mention how annoying the driving is? I mean it's like tails around corners a lot at high speed ridiculously, object collisions make no sense and the physics is even weirder cause one small knock can send even my tank flying out.

There are times when it plays out right, it does it well. But its flaws also pulls it out from even being decent. The agency car which shapes from a wall-hugging rover to speedster to a tank can't be utilized properly in scenarios. In fact, there's no scenario within the main mission that tells you to use them at all. Tank can't even aim let alone cause much damage ever compared to the rockets I carry. It's embarrassing.

Crackdown 3 feels like a missed opportunity when it comes to these, it feels like the devs ticked the box and decided "ehh well, it is what it is" because it feels hollow. Not even close to being as good as other open-world games including the recent Assassin's Creed games.

But when you get super powerful, you just carelessly create more mayhem and forget what you were suppose to do. Am not sure if by design that's mostly a good thing. But the mayhem is certainly exhilarating especially with so many enemy types you have to combat.

And Some Other Stuff

Multiplayer is very barebones. Like two different modes with one map each, that's it. It's just a playground for you to test out the cloud-based destruction which does look impressive but does it look anything even close to the 2015 reveal?

I mean fine, the physics based destruction doesn't have to look really appealing and game changing but at the least you could do is make a fun mode out of it. It doesn't. I even forgot the multiplayer existed sadly.

There is 2-player Co-op for the campaign but you get your share of enjoyment when you ramp up the difficulty to max, only then it gets really enjoyable.

Graphics looks great, I mean don't get me wrong. It is gorgeous thanks to the UE4 engine. The cell shaded design kind of works to its silly charming nature. Although it could also look muted during daytime because well the city seems dead as not much happens here and civilian NPCs I guess are despondent. Though I think its high time Microsoft stopped relying on Epic's engine and rather would just use their own in-house engine like what Sony is doing with Naughty Dog's in-house and Guerrilla Game's Decima engine. Mostly because UE4 isn't well optimized for AMD hardware, just look at earlier Fortnite and Gears of War 4 benchmarks. Hell, here's WCCFTech's benchmark for CD 3. Playing it on the Xbox One S, it was pretty laggy and the visuals were like pixelated grain at times. It's clear that most of the compromised was done within the base console while it looks fabulous on the Xbox One X and high-end PCs.

The music is edible, if you're into techno with some synth kicking in, you'll be comfortable listening while blowing stuff up. The sound design is very bombastic as well, like Michael Bay's favorite past-time. You can also laugh in joy while your enemies cry like grade schoolers after being pummeled.

So I Buy Or No?

I wish I could say more, but as it stands. Nope, all that wait for pretty much nothing. Not even the promise land of cloud-based destruction that would tear one map asunder with debris of buildings like rain.

If you're curious to try it out then give a go from Xbox Game Pass, but if you like ultimate destruction, collecting orbs, doing platform with not so fluid controls and tense boss fights; then you should purchase it and bestow yourself its glory in a high-end PC. Other than that though, it doesn't improve much or features anything new apart from what you've already played or other games have done to death.

I would also suggest that you check out other open world sandbox titles like Prototype, Just Cause, Sleeping Dogs, Saint's Row, Infamous and even another Xbox-exclusive that's easily preferable: Sunset Overdrive. Crackdown 3 kind of feels like a missed opportunity. Especially with the premise it's based in. It does what it set to do really well enough, but not much else diversifying the fun factor without evem feeling worn out.

Also to address the development issues, Reagent Games headed by Dave Jones who created the original series worked on this game till 2018, when his Cloudgen tech was bought by Epic and him, and his workforce moved there and decided to be more of consultant instead. With Sumo Digital finishing everything up. It's a shame considering Ruffian Games created Crackdown 2 and did not participate to work. Which is why it feels little bit half-baked.

I've even heard the multiplayer will get updated with more stuff in the near future, though am not holding my breath. As of now, here's my score and disappointing sigh of another Xbox exclusive that bit the dust.

6.5