Get those orbs!
(Note: This review is purely of the main campaign)
I recently played and completed Kingdom Hearts 3, a game which has been in development for a long time. Many peoples’ opinion of the game, including my own, was that it feels like a PlayStation 2 game but made for the PlayStation 4. It’s one of those franchises that keeps it’s gameplay and feel the same because it knows it works. The same idea and thinking applies to Crackdown 3 as it feels like an XBOX 360 game made for the XBOX One. That isn’t neccesarilly a bad thing but it doesn’t change much of the Crackdown gameplay.
In Crackdown 3 you play as an agent, man or woman, as you fight back against the evil Terra Nova to regain control of New Providence. New Providence is a tropical landscape destroyed by Terra Nova through their operations. You, as the agent, must dismantle Terra Nova piece by piece to regain control of the island whilst also collected orbs and blowing lots of stuff up. The main agent is Jaxon who is played by Terry Crews, a man so strong that in the game I’ve had people run into him and die on the spot.
Crackdown 3 isn’t exactly a very long game but it can be if you decide to collect every single orb. Much like the previous games collecting orbs are vital to your player’s progression as it unlocks different abilities, weapons, vehicles and more. You can however become over powered quite qucikly. Each objective on the map shows your survival rating and the lowest mine ever seemed to get was 50%. Now 50/50 is alright odds going into a fire fight but one shot from my rocket launcher at the boss won me the objective and that was that.
Most of my time playing Crackdown 3 I found my self simply getting into spots in battles where the enemy simply couldn’t hit me and I just unleashed ‘hell’ until the boss was dead. It is small elements like that which makes the game feel repetitive and easy. You can up the difficulty but it still feels relatively easy. Very quickly you can learn what your favourite weapons are and use them, it is fun to continuously blow people up with a rocket launcher but even that gets a little dull after awhile.
With all the destruction in the game it remains surprising to me that the cloud technology isn’t in the main campaign and all this firepower you’re unleashing doesn’t have much affect to the surrounding buildings. Of course there are restrictions, some orbs would be unobtainable if you just destroyed buildings but they could’ve easily regenerated them, right?
The overall story is simple and while I haven’t managed to play any of the online features yet I can easily say that the campaign is enough for me. I smashed my way through the main campaign which featured Terry Crews constantly saying “F#%k Gravity” and to be fair, yes gravity isn’t fun when the game sometimes feels like it’s against you. There are radio towers which you have to jump up, similar to lookout points in Assassins Creed
In terms of the game’s mission objectives they are simply taking control of specific locations and destroying others. Most of the game is as simple as travelling to one spot, blowing everything up and then moving along to the next. Which is fine for the game that Crackdown 3 is. It feels like an XBOX 360 game because of that but everything else has been upgraded, mainly the visuals and design. If you’re a fan of the Crackdown series then it’s really just more of the same.
It might just sound like I had an awful experience playing Crackdown 3 but the fact is that it was surprisingly enjoyable. While I wouldn’t sit through the game again I also love the fact that I can get it and play it all with Game Pass. Crackdown 3 helps to show that XBOX is changing its ways and pushing to release it’s announced games, they may not be amazing but to get it as part of Game Pass is a great deal. Crackdown 3 can be retitive but its also refreshing to play a game with no stakes, something I can just blow stuff up in and not worry about coming first or completing a specific goal. If you’ve got a few spare hours and Game Pass then you may as well play it.