Your character is supposed to be a super agile fighter, but he can easily overshoot a short hop.Īgility is an issue because as you make your way up the towers, elevators don't always continue to function once the game marks you as having moved past it. Given that Crackdown 3 has multiple sections where you need to hop from narrow beam to narrow beam, this will likely be a source of some frustration. Even when you've leveled up your agility score, it's still easy to overshoot a ledge. What's surprising about all of this is that while your guns can lock on, your traversal does not. That's not due to a skill requirement, but the boss fights ramp up the challenge because they dump extra sets of grunts at you in an attempt to overwhelm. Progression through the levels in the world was usually straightforward, with the challenge being the boss fights. As a result, I moved forward a bit, shot a few baddies, stepped back, and repeated the cycle again. I could usually see (and lock on to) enemies before they could see me. It's the same technique I was able to use for most of the game. The system works, but the game design doesn't scale with your powers - with the exception of throwing more enemies at you.Įven in the very last level of the game, when the Agency boss was telling me that I wasn't leveled up enough and should come back later, it was easy to fight my way through the tower because I could pick enemies off from a distance. Want to be more effective with guns? Use them. Want to jump higher and farther? Collect agility orbs. Exploring (and doing) is how you level up your primary attributes. Certain areas have stronger enemies, but that doesn't prevent you from exploring. Like other open-world games, Crackdown 3 doesn't directly block you from exploring. Little things like this make Crackdown 3 feel like a collection of side missions rather than a coherent adventure. Later on in the game, the radio chatter was talking about how I need to take out Roxy. For example, Roxy the AI boss was one of the first ones I took down. The mission progression doesn't even seem to register with the AI banter. There are plenty of possible questions, and there aren't any concrete answers beyond the player being good and the bad lady being bad. It's as if the creators of 'Lost' decided to write the script for a video game. There are vague references to a shadowy puppet master who is supposedly pulling the strings, but the lack of a core story makes it all feel like random lore. Kill the bosses to unlock the final boss. There is merely a collection of independent missions that lead to bosses. The game takes a non-linear, open-world approach to progression, similar to the Assassin's Creed or Far Cry games, but here, there aren't any core 'story' missions. This disconnected approach even applies to the main storyline in Crackdown 3. Instead of prioritizing a specific type of gameplay, Crackdown 3 tries to throw too much into its toolkit and ends up as a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. Each of these games stood out from the pack because they focused on one thing and did it well. Traversal during combat? Sunset Overdrive says hello. Destruction? Red Faction: Guerrilla set the standard for that. Superhero action? Saints Row IV did it better. As a game, it takes inspiration from a number of different titles, but it doesn't build on any of them well, and it doesn't innovate on what came before. The best way to describe Crackdown 3 is painfully average.

Twelve years later, Crackdown 3 has landed on the Xbox One X, though with more of a whimper than a bang.

Plenty of gamers bought the original Crackdown just to get access to the Halo 3 beta, but once the beta was over, realized that a pretty solid game had come along with it. Back in 2007, Microsoft used the hype around the Halo 3 beta to launch a new franchise.

Crackdown 3 character creator