The story of Crackdown 3 takes place several years after the events of Crackdown 2, with the ever-present (and secretly evil) paramilitary organization called The Agency, dispatching a crew of its super-powered agents to the island city of New Providence to deal with Terra Nova, a massive multi-national corporation run by Elizabeth Niemand that has been covertly causing destruction and massive, city-wide blackouts across the globe. Predictably, things go wrong, the Agency transport is destroyed and all the agents aboard are killed. One such Agent, Commander Jaxon – excellently portrayed by the always electrifying but sadly underused Terry Crews – (or one of a few other generic, faceless Agents) is found and revived using the Agency’s cloning technology by a local militia leader fighting against Terra Nova named Echo.

As a result of your untimely death, however, your Agent is
de-powered and has to start over, regaining his or her lost skills as you get
to work taking out Terra Nova’s command hierarchy, with multiple lieutenants
reporting to three main bosses and the three main bosses reporting to Elizabeth
Niemand herself. That’s pretty much it in terms of plot and storytelling.
You’ll get a few (barely) animated cutscenes throughout your adventure but this
is not the game to play if you’re looking for an intricate story to keep you
going.

Now, if you’ve played either of the two previous Crackdown games before, then you’ll know what to expect from Crackdown 3, as it’s more of the same running, jumping, climbing, orb collecting, throwing cars at people, and blowing stuff up that you’re used to. And therein lies the central problem: it’s too much like everything you’ve come to expect from Crackdown. Crackdown 3 is an obsessively formulaic sequel that sticks too rigidly to past gameplay structures, takes no risks and pushes no envelopes.

The gameplay doesn’t evolve much from the word go. The same mediocre lock-on targeting system from the original game is present here, which results in gameplay boiling down to pressing the left trigger to lock on and the right to fire, that is when the lock-on system actually targets what you want it to target and doesn’t consider a passing car as much of a threat as the guy shooting you with a rocket launcher. This same gameplay rhythm repeats itself ad nauseum, and despite your Agent having access to an array of strength-based melee attacks, you’ll rarely want to use them. As cool as the Flying Fist is, it’s seldom more effective than blasting away with the (often explosive) weapon of your choosing, like the overpowered Homing Rocket, Mass Driver or the Pulse Beam, which chews through human targets. Because some of these weapons are so overpowered, you’ll rarely want to deviate from them while the rest of the game’s arsenal collects dust.

The formula is simple: besiege and take out enemy
strongholds to weaken the lieutenants, take out the lieutenants to weaken the
bosses, take out the bosses, rinse and repeat until a viable path is opened
towards the game’s big bad. In 2007, this was a good-enough structure and one
that worked well enough to provide an organized challenge curve for the player
to follow, but over a decade and a new console generation later rehashing the
same formula just isn’t enough. Crackdown
has had two chances now to innovate and push the franchise in new directions
and provide new and exciting gameplay options but, sadly, these opportunities
have been squandered.

Matters aren’t helped by Crackdown
3’s setting, the Terra Nova run city of New Providence. In my experience,
New Providence feels strangely empty and lifeless, even when the streets are
filled with pedestrians and vehicles. Though I appreciate the attention paid to
the sense of scale and verticality which makes it fun to leap around collecting
agility orbs and searching out hidden orbs I never really enjoyed exploring the
city for the sake of exploration. Though some nice touches are made to
emphasize the differences between districts, and highlighting the literal
barriers between the luxury high rises, neon-drenched nightlife of the rich and
the poor, polluted slums in a sharp critique of modern times, the city
ultimately comes across as bland.

Throughout the city are enemy supply points that can be
taken over to create fast travel points, prisoner hardpoints to be liberated,
vehicle lockups to destroy, chemical plants to blow up, propaganda towers to
climb and other strongholds that need to be destroyed in order to open up the
game’s bosses. Outside of the campaign challenges (I say that since there are
no traditional “missions”), there are the expected rooftop and vehicle races
and a thousand orbs to locate, scattered throughout the city. But once you’ve
completed the main story (which will take about 10 hours or so), there’s little
motivation to do many of the side activities, unless you’re a manic
completionist.

Now, I’m a big fan of racing games, from arcade classics
like Ridge Racer, Need for Speed and Mario
Kart to racing simulators like Forza
Motorsport and Gran Turismo, so
driving physics in all kinds of games – including open world titles like this
one – are important to me. That said, Crackdown
3 has some of the worst driving
physics I’ve ever seen. The physics aren’t just bad, they’re fundamentally broken.
Driving most vehicles feels floaty and imprecise and engaging the handbrake
makes cars react like their tires were just doused in oil. Driving over even
the smallest of obstacles can topple many cars or cause them to glitch out,
even occasionally catapulting them across the map.

The Agency vehicle is perhaps the most egregious offender in
that it has three different modes and all three handle absolutely terribly. The
“Lightning” form serves as the base form, possesses the highest top speed and has
the ability to side swipe other vehicles, sending them flying off the road. The
second “Spider” form, is a nod to the original Agency SUV and shares its
ability to perform spring jumps and stick to walls to drive up the side of
buildings but is hampered by the physics engine which can see it flipping over
at the slightest bump, getting caught on barriers and making it a pain and a
half to drive.

Finally, there’s the Minotaur tank, which is second to the
Spider form in delivering a wonky driving experience, compounded by the sense
that it feels like it weighs far less than a massive tank should. Rolling over
bodies and plowing through barriers should be a simple matter for a tank, but I
find myself routinely stymied by tiny objects in my path, and I’ll never forget
the time rolling into a toppled street light caused it to flip onto its rear
and do a couple pirouettes before slowly falling onto its roof.

The visual design is disappointment, featuring a somewhat
washed out aesthetic with flat textures, dull character and enemy designs which
combines to create a mediocre overall look. The world is bright and colorful
but the lack of truly standout visuals makes it all the more disappointing when
the framerate takes an unfortunate tumble in the heat of the action. Simply
put, this game does not look good enough to stutter as much as it does (the PC
version, at least, as the console versions of the game run quite well).

Many of the same complaints that were levied against 2010’s Crackdown 2 can be dusted off and
re-used here. The campaign paints by the same numbers as the first game,
rehashing the same formula the 2007 original employed with no novel or
interesting twists to set it apart. The game is also too easy for the most
part. You’re granted two health bars, one being your actual health bar and the
other your regenerating shield, which refills after a (slightly too long) delay
if you refrain from taking damage or refills as you kill enemies. The
difficulty is rather uneven though, and there are some massive difficulty
spikes here and there (here’s looking at you, Kuli Ngata).

In terms of multiplayer, there’s the same two player co-op that’s been around since day one and the team-based, adversarial Wrecking Zone mode, which I didn’t bother with, so I can’t comment on it either way.

This doesn’t feel like a current generation title,
especially one that’s ostensibly supposed to be a AAA effort from one of
Microsoft’s first-party studios released this late in the generation.
Unfortunately, this looks and feels every bit like a budget title, and not even
a particularly good one. Ultimately, a game must boil down to whether or not
it’s “fun” and, despite my complaints, yeah, it is fun. But simply being
mindless fun isn’t enough to make it worthwhile, as its repetitive brand of
third-person shooting, jumping, climbing and blowing stuff up eventually gets
tiring.

What we have here is a dull and formulaic rehash of a series
that started life as a surprisingly great new IP many bought just so they could
access the online beta for Halo 3
proudly touted on the front of the box at time of release. Without the massive,
potentially genre-defining, “cloud powered” destruction seen in the early days
of this title’s development and nothing else new or exciting to hang its hat on
other than a few more of the same kinds of explosions we’ve been accustomed to
since day one, Crackdown 3 just
doesn’t have enough going for it to justify spending $60 on it. If you’re
already subscribed to the Xbox Game Pass (as I am), it’s worth a try, but I
doubt the bog standard and repetitive action on display here will inspire too
many return trips to New Providence from any but big Crackdown fans such as myself.