Crackdown Review

[Ariane Delbrune]

Crackdown3 has a lot of baggage. It's predecessor, the smash-hit Crackdown 2, came out nine years ago. Normally those kinds of development gaps are reserved for auteur projects like Kingdom Hearts 3 or anything by Kojima. Crackdown, as a franchise, puts out a fast-food vibe. It's fun, it's simple and it shouldn't be taken too seriously. But a lot can happen in nine years, and the gaming landscape has undergone tectonic changes since 2010. A near-future cyberpunkish open world shooter may have been novel and gimmicky back then, but tastes and standards have changed. And while Crackdown 3 offers a lot of fun, it assumes this recipe is still fresh. It isn't. Pair that with a prolonged development with more than a few false starts and a lot of fans aren't sure what to expect. I know I wasn't.

What I found inthe Crackdown 3 campaign was a game that, in many respects, is a welcome departure from the "why so serious?" vibe of modern shooters. Crackdown 3 offers the same aim assist mechanics familiar to those who play Rockstar titles, but the frenetic action and meta edgelord humor never let you take things too seriously. It also scales up rather nicely thanks to the series' trademark "kill for skill" progression system. Collecting colorful glowing XP orbs that tie directly to your actions is immensely satisfying and well-balanced. Shoot an enemy a few times and finish him with a punch and you'll get a mix of blue shooting XP and red melee XP.

Nowhere is this more evident than with Agility. You don't earn Agility in combat, but you gather these green orbs in hard-to-reach locations all over the map. Each map section offers a few dozen Agility orbs to find, and scouting for the green beacons from rooftops and pathfinding a route gave me serious Assassin's Creed style feels. Even better, traversal is directly impacted by your experience. You unlock things like double-jumps and dashes as your Agility skill increases. These are put to the test by way of immense propaganda towers, which you must scale and deactivate. The shifting platforms and fall away floors add a verticality challenge not found often in open world shooters. I had as much fun climbing as I did shooting. And shooting was a lot of fun.

Crackdown 3 is at it's best when it gets ludicrous. The gameplay loop is standard shooter fare. Go to Waypoint X, shoot a lot of things, sometimes a tough thing shows up that needs extra shootings. But in Crackdown 3 the sheer volume of things to shoot can get insane. You'll have dozens of enemies on screen blasting away as you dodge and aim and blast. It manages to be tense and exciting without feeling overwhelming and unfair. An ever-increasing arsenal of stronger and more bombastic weapons adds to the fun. And when those bosses do show up they're never tedious bullet sponges. The encounters take a bit longer, but there's no grind here. A lot of variety in the enemy types helps, too.

What Crackdown 3 is missing is the level beyond solid shooting mechanics and the occasional chuckle. The writing has more misses than hits, and every genuinely funny moment (Terry Crews yelling "Fuck gravity!" while climbing is my fave) drowns in a sea of Mountain Dew-drenched gamer edginess. The story follows a trope-y dystopian oligarchy where corporations run everything until SOMEONE INSPIRES THE PEOPLE TO RISE UP! Guess who that is? That there is never any collateral reputation damage to your wanton and careless destruction (I started the game by killing civilians for a solid 10 minutes and nothing happened) is the early indication of a shallowness that undermines solid action fundamentals.

Crackdown 3 never elevates itself beyond the level of "fine." While the gunplay and traversal are satisfying, they take place in an open world that is both busy and lifeless. Civilians have no character, no personality. There are virtually no interior spaces, no stores or distractions to visit. Crackdown 2 didn't exist in a world that knows The Witcher 3 and GTA V. Crackdown 3 does, and suffers for it.

Also the driving is terrible. Vehicles handle like cold butter on stale bread. There is no sense of velocity or balance, and the game throws so many challenges and checkpoints and enemies at you the faster you move the more you feel you're missing. I had a lot more fun walking around from mayhem to mayhem than trying to drive anywhere, especially given how comically weak vehicles are compared to your OP hero.

Is Crackdown 3 a bad game? No, it's not. It offers a nice contrast in a space full of games that take themselves too seriously. The humor falls flat, and the story sags, but if you want to run, gun and smash stuff then you'll have a good time. But the extended development time, and the utter lack of AAA-exclusives on Xbox, had me hoping for much more. What could've been a brilliant piece of satire or a hilarious over-the-top shooting spree fails at both. Add to that an open world that feels dreadfully dated and you're left with a game that is almost as good as it should've been.

(Note: Due to a limited number of players and availability, I was not able to test the Crackdown 3 multiplayer mode Wrecking Zone, which features fully-destructible environments and offers loads of replayability. I will update my review accordingly should it change the final score.)

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. What a horrible story there must be to tell of the last six or so years of Crackdown 3's development, if the result of all that time is this wet tissue of a game. A bland, woefully dated, aimless and deeply derivative open city, which somehow can't even be saved by the presence of Terry Crews.

Crackdown 3 is a game that desperately wants to exist in a universe where Saints Row IV never happened. Because in that world people wouldn't just be thinking about how nice it would be to be playing Saints Row IV again instead of this. Unfortunately Crackdown 3 exists in this universe, where nearly six years later, it feels like the Lidl's own version that your aunt bought you, not realising it wasn't the real thing.

There's a city called New Providence. There's a baddy organisation called Terra Nova. There's a goody organisation called The Agency. That's the end of the story. Crackdown 3 is a game about a map, which is covered in icons, and the player who has to go to all those locations and repeat one of several near-identical mission types. For some reason a number of voices incessantly drivel meandering nothingness in your ears, talking and talking and talking, but never saying anything.

Your only meaningful sense of direction is a hierarchy of bosses to take down, those higher up the ten-person chain made easier to defeat (or so it says) by taking out those below. So there are six mission types for the six bosses at the bottom, then three for those above, and then the top boss saved for the end. You complete each boss's series of utterly identical missions (killing the guards at train stations, blowing up the tanks at chemical works, um... blowing up something else, killing other people elsewhere), about 13 times for each, and then they appear on the map as a frivolous boss fight. (One boss fight involved standing still and firing a laser weapon at an enormous enemy while she stood there doing nothing about it.)

This was initially supposed to be the big technical bonanza, multiplayer with a fully destructible city, incredible effects, and none of that has made it into the game. But even if we don't judge it against what it claimed it would be, but rather just what it is, it's a grimly poor open city that clings to the hoary old tropes we all thought we were done with half a decade ago. And boy oh boy, does it look like it came out at least half a decade ago.

I just can't think of a single element of the game that seems to have gone well. It passes time, I played it from start to finish and didn't actively hate it, but I can't think of a single area where it shines. Sure, there are a ton of over-powerful weapons, loads of different types, and a bunch of different skills that improve as you use them. And there are ability orbs, which when collected will level up your acrobatic skills. They're all in place, and the movement (but for character's opting to just slide off platform edges) is all fine. But there's nothing satisfying to do with any of it.

This is just an astonishing anachronism, a game developed in a sealed bubble of time, where no progress of any type occurred since Crackdown 2 came out in 2010. But then made less fun by a fussy, muddled city, gruesome repetition, and perhaps most egregious of all, the very worst attempts at humour. "I love the smell of toxic fumes in the morning," says one of the two voices that cannot sodding shut up throughout. And he says it SO MANY TIMES. OVER AND OVER. Each crappy line dragged out when the game thinks it's apposite, awkwardly failing about half the time.

There are, you'll be shocked to learn, towers to climb. These are platforming sections for which the third-person perspective is nowhere near designed, meaning you have to make all sorts of blind jumps over moving platforms until you get to the top and press a button. There are bases to clear of enemies, and panels to hack. There are escalating scales of reinforcements in response to your actions. There is absolutely anything you'd expect to find in an open city game from a decade ago, included seemingly out of obligation rather than any sense of design direction or purpose.

Combat is just about passable. For the most part, you'll get through any encounter with just one weapon. The Plasma Beam is so madly over-powered that it provided solace from having to spend any longer in each encounter than necessary. You aim by locking on to an enemy, as free aiming is all but useless. Left trigger to lock, right to fire. Repeat until they're all dead.

But infuriatingly, the lock thinks it's knows FAR better than you about where you want to aim, such that it will ignore an enemy directly in your sights for, say, a barrel it prefers behind a wall far over to the left. As far as I can tell it's biasing anything you previously locked onto over anything new, and it's just the stupidest decision. It doesn't work. It makes a bland experience far more tiresome.

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