Once the destruction went, however, most of the game’s imaginative aspects went with it. I’m not even sure how developer Sumo Digital would have achieved that while balancing things like collecting orbs and tackling bosses, but that mystery is what would have been so exciting about playing Crackdown 3. It would have changed everything about how players approached the game. In terms of gameplay and pure spectacle, taking down whole skyscrapers would have been a revolutionary achievement. It’s hard to ignore just how much these features would have added to the campaign. Unfortunately, those selling points were lost over the course of its long development, and destructibility was eventually relegated to its multiplayer half, Wrecking Zone. When Crackdown 3 was first announced, four-player co-op and total destructibility were the main draws. I generally like to judge a game solely on its own merits, but it became impossible for me to judge Crackdown 3 outside of its prerelease context. If it drowns, then that’s one less mouth to feed. Microsoft releasing Crackdown 3 between other heavy-hitters like Far Cry New Dawn, the long-awaited Metro Exodus, and the upcoming Anthem, not to mention the shooting star that is Apex Legends, feels like a parent throwing its baby into the lake. After several delays and whether the game would ever even launch became a running gag, now that it’s finally here, it feels almost like an afterthought. Twelve years later, we’ve finally got the third game in the series. The first game was a sleeper hit mostly because people bought it for access to the Halo 3 beta without really expecting much from the game itself. It almost seems like an accident that Crackdown became one of Xbox’s only current exclusives. But for those who already thought Crackdown 2, coming just three years after the original Crackdown, was a lazy sequel, you’ll be hard-pressed to excuse the nine years (five in development) it took to create what is essentially the same exact game you’ve already played twice. The weapons are a blast to use, and comboing jumps, mid-air dashes, ground pounds, and homing rockets to take down scores of enemies is intuitive and addictive.įor some fans, new weapons and a new city sandbox will be all the motivation they need to buy into Crackdown 3.

Crackdown 3 retains all the high-jumping, gun-toting, car-throwing, big-exploding action that is signature to the series, and its new setting offers plenty of opportunities to find and collect orbs. If that’s all that matters to you when choosing a game to play, then you can stop reading right now.

Crackdown 3 multiplayer coop