Matters aren’t helped by Crackdown 3’s setting, the Terra Nova run city of New Providence. Crackdown has had two chances now to innovate and push the franchise in new directions and provide new and exciting gameplay options but, sadly, these opportunities have been squandered. In 2007, this was a good-enough structure and one that worked well enough to provide an organized challenge curve for the player to follow, but over a decade and a new console generation later rehashing the same formula just isn’t enough. The formula is simple: besiege and take out enemy strongholds to weaken the lieutenants, take out the lieutenants to weaken the bosses, take out the bosses, rinse and repeat until a viable path is opened towards the game’s big bad. Because some of these weapons are so overpowered, you’ll rarely want to deviate from them while the rest of the game’s arsenal collects dust. As cool as the Flying Fist is, it’s seldom more effective than blasting away with the (often explosive) weapon of your choosing, like the overpowered Homing Rocket, Mass Driver or the Pulse Beam, which chews through human targets. This same gameplay rhythm repeats itself ad nauseum, and despite your Agent having access to an array of strength-based melee attacks, you’ll rarely want to use them. The same mediocre lock-on targeting system from the original game is present here, which results in gameplay boiling down to pressing the left trigger to lock on and the right to fire, that is when the lock-on system actually targets what you want it to target and doesn’t consider a passing car as much of a threat as the guy shooting you with a rocket launcher. The gameplay doesn’t evolve much from the word go. Crackdown 3 is an obsessively formulaic sequel that sticks too rigidly to past gameplay structures, takes no risks and pushes no envelopes. And therein lies the central problem: it’s too much like everything you’ve come to expect from Crackdown. Now, if you’ve played either of the two previous Crackdown games before, then you’ll know what to expect from Crackdown 3, as it’s more of the same running, jumping, climbing, orb collecting, throwing cars at people, and blowing stuff up that you’re used to. You’ll get a few (barely) animated cutscenes throughout your adventure but this is not the game to play if you’re looking for an intricate story to keep you going. That’s pretty much it in terms of plot and storytelling. One such Agent, Commander Jaxon – excellently portrayed by the always electrifying but sadly underused Terry Crews – (or one of a few other generic, faceless Agents) is found and revived using the Agency’s cloning technology by a local militia leader fighting against Terra Nova named Echo.Īs a result of your untimely death, however, your Agent is de-powered and has to start over, regaining his or her lost skills as you get to work taking out Terra Nova’s command hierarchy, with multiple lieutenants reporting to three main bosses and the three main bosses reporting to Elizabeth Niemand herself. Predictably, things go wrong, the Agency transport is destroyed and all the agents aboard are killed. The story of Crackdown 3 takes place several years after the events of Crackdown 2, with the ever-present (and secretly evil) paramilitary organization called The Agency, dispatching a crew of its super-powered agents to the island city of New Providence to deal with Terra Nova, a massive multi-national corporation run by Elizabeth Niemand that has been covertly causing destruction and massive, city-wide blackouts across the globe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |