Sadly, Crackdown 3 fails to deliver anything new

If you have an Xbox Game Pass, Crackdown 3 is worth checking out, but if not it’s probably not worth opening your wallet for.

Sadly, Crackdown 3 fails to deliver anything new.

Fighting supervillains isn’t something for the average law enforcement agent. When you’re fighting people with laser beams and a private army, you need to call in a super-agent with superhero-like abilities and a total disdain for concepts such as “excessive force” and “non-lethal options”.

Crackdown 3, developed by Sumo Digital and published by Microsoft for PC and Xbox One, has been designed with this ethos in mind, but doesn’t quite live up to the hype from my perspective.

The simple fact is there’s nothing new in Crackdown 3’s story. In fact, it basically feels identical in many ways to Volition’s Agents of Mayhem.

While Crackdown 3 has Terry Crews in a prominent role — and he is well cast — I just found the entire single-player game to range somewhere from disappointing to uninspiring. The graphics are lacklustre, the action is run-of-the-mill, and there’s basically nothing in this game I haven’t played elsewhere — in fact, I spent much of my time with the campaign suffering a sense of déjà vu because of this.

While Agents of Mayhem (and its predecessor, Saints Row IV) fully acknowledged how ridiculous it was and ran with it, Crackdown 3 doesn’t quite cross the checkpoint into self-awareness. The game’s attempts at humour fall flat and the plot manages to be both thin and derivative at the same time.

Crackdown 3 emphasises over-the-top action and explosions.

An evil company named TerraNova has plunged much of the world into technological darkness, except for an island state they run thats seems like a pretty decent place to live, all things considered. For some inadequately explained reason, The Agency you work for wants to go in and mess the place up; cue lots of explosions and shooting of random baddies and jumping around collecting orbs to increase your various abilities.

I didn’t really get why I was even there in the first place, and I didn’t feel like I was liberating an oppressed people or making much of a difference to the world.

It’s not just the ho-hum setting and design — I mean, I love open world games and they’re all essentially running around different settings with Category R weapons committing one indictable offence after another — but Crackdown 3 just seemed to lack energy. The game has been delayed by several years and I couldn’t help but feel the developers had simply gotten to the point where they wanted to get it published so everyone could move on to something else.

Awkwardly, the flagship feature — the Wrecking Zone multiplayer, with destructible environments powered by Microsoft Azure cloud computing — won’t be available at launch; Microsoft have said it will be available “at a later date” but did not have any further specifics.

This is a pretty big omission considering the Wrecking Zone is one of the big attractions of the game — I enjoyed what I played during a hands-on a few weeks ago, but the mind boggles at how such a significant feature of the game could be missing at launch.

Actor Terry Crews is Commander Jaxon, one of the playable characters in Crackdown 3.

There is a two-player co-op mode available, but given the generally unremarkable main campaign I’m not sure that’s going to be a huge drawcard, although throwing cars and blowing stuff up with a friend is pretty much always a good time in gaming.

On paper — and several years ago when the game was first put into production — Crackdown 3 would have been a decent game, but games have evolved and I just don’t think this one comes up to scratch.

It’s not that it’s a terrible game — it does what it does quite adequately, the controls work well and I had no issues with crashes or bugs — but it’s just so unremarkable as to be a disappointment. All in all, Crackdown 3 is the sort of game I expect from a developer still finding their feet, not one partnered with one of the world’s largest software and hardware companies.

If you’ve got an Xbox Game Pass subscription (and if you don’t, seriously consider getting one) then the game is free so the only thing it’ll cost you is time to download and part of your data allowance.

For everyone else though, there’s pretty much no reason to recommend Crackdown 3 — sure, it has a celebrity actor, it’s big, and it’s bombastic; but it’s also been done before.

— Continue the conversation about all things gaming on Twitter @RoyceWilsonAU

Originally published as Sadly, Crackdown 3 fails to deliver anything new