Textures are mostly simple, and character models aren’t very detailed. The game doesn’t look actively bad, but it isn’t particularly dazzling either. In terms of technical performance, Crackdown 3 is by no means groundbreaking, at least in the campaign mode. It isn’t a game that takes itself seriously, and that’s refreshing to see in an age where games are adopting increasingly somber tones.
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Crackdown 3 is Earth Defense Force or Sharknado or literally any porn movie - the story and setting are only there to serve as a backdrop for the real reason you’re here. The narrative isn’t very original and only barely even tries to take itself seriously, and that’s okay. Now let’s kill a bunch of robots and dab on their corpses. You play a cybernetic cop who works for “The Agency.” Also, Terry Crews is here and he’s flexing his pecs menacingly. The city is called New Providence, and the corporation running things is called Terranova, with the very evil Elizabeth Niemand serving as it’s founder and CEO. There’s a city that’s run by an evil corporation with some bad dudes in charge, and you gotta go kill them before they destroy the world. The story in Crackdown 3 is as cookie cutter as they come. And so, the object of my affection became leveling up as many skills as much as I could and becoming the ultimate badass, which made putting down the controller increasingly difficult. Being able to pick up enemy tanks and hurl them across the city has never felt so good.
By the end of the game I used guns almost exclusively for shooting drones and gunships - everything else was subjected to the wrath of my mighty fist, which could hone in on targets from across a room, and tear through any armor as if it were paper. Why spend time closing in on a guy to punch him, when I’ve got automatic weapons to shoot them with? Looking back on it now makes me feel like a naive child, who couldn’t comprehend the glorious future that awaited him. When I first started playing, I found the Strength skill to be useless.
The game does a great job at making every skill, even the ones you think you’ll never use at the outset, incredibly valuable at later levels. By the end of the game, I found myself firing miniaturized black holes at the enemy, ground pounding dozens of enemies to death with a single punch, and leaping over large buildings in a single bound. Leveling up an ability isn’t just a small change that adds some extra zeroes to your damage output, but a massive, game-altering achievement that makes you feel exponentially more badass. For example, leveling up agility makes your agent faster, able to jump higher, and gives you more maneuvering options (like midair dashes), while increasing your driving skills gives you the ability to drive on the sides of walls and summon a tank. Leveling these abilities up becomes necessary to powering up your character and completing your mission. Everything you do in Crackdown 3 helps to level up one of your five core abilities: Agility, Firearms, Strength, Explosives, and Driving.
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In the beginning, you feel slow, weak, and outnumbered by the enemies pit against you, but in no time at all you begin to unlock the full potential of your cybernetic body and turn the tables against your foes. It modernizes the original addictive gameplay loop of exploring a massive city with tons of verticality, collecting orbs, leveling up, and taking out the bad guys’ organization one piece at a time until the whole thing comes crumbling down. In a lot of ways, Crackdown 3 feels like a remake of the original - and that’s a good thing. Well, have no fear, because Crackdown 3 is here and it’s bigger, crazier, and more explosion-filled than it’s ever been. With so many Xbox exclusives getting cancelled in recent years, many people were understandably worried that the game would never see the light of day. By now, you’ve probably seen various trailers and announcements at E3 and other gaming conventions, and read about multiple delays and a seemingly troubled development cycle. Now, more than a decade later, the long-dormant franchise is poised to make a comeback with Crackdown 3. And so, almost overnight, the Crackdown franchise became a part of the Xbox culture. Suddenly, all of my friends found themselves scaling skyscrapers, tossing cars at bad guys, and bringing down the criminal empires of Pacific City. The crazy part? Crackdown actually ended up being an awesome game in its own right. Even if most Xbox fans wouldn’t have ordinarily bought it, everyone I knew ended up doing so, because…c’mon, it’s Halo.
When the original Crackdown was released in 2007, it mostly served as a trojan horse for the much-anticipated Halo 3 multiplayer beta. The Crackdown franchise has a special history for the Xbox community.