Yes, you will see civilians wandering around or cars driving across a highway. The city of New Providence isn’t all that terrible to look at–I’ll touch on this further in a moment–but it just feels so lifeless. Probably the strangest factor of Crackdown 3 though, and the aspect of the game that I think ages it the most, is the open-world itself. Then again, I’m just a fan of any sort of collectathon in games so this is likely just suited to my own specific tastes. Leveling up your agility abilities specifically by grabbing every green orb in sight continues to be an oddly fun grind, for one reason or another. This might sound like a dumb thing to say, but anyone who has played previous Crackdown games knows how fun it is to collect every orb that you see in sight spread out across the city. Honestly, the best part about Crackdown 3 on the gameplay front to me remains just running around and collecting orbs. This was honestly fine by me though as the controls for most cars felt pretty bad anyway. I know that I rarely hopped into my vehicle while playing because I wouldn’t ever want to pass orbs or other hidden goodies. On the weapon front though, some I clearly found to be vastly superior to others leading me to rarely rotating out my guns and instead sticking with the same five or so for the entirety of the game.Ĭrackdown 3’s entire mission structure feels like an amalgamation of the side activities that other open world games will throw at you nowadays.ĭriving is also present in Crackdown 3, though I’m hard pressed to know why anyone would really ever jump in a vehicle all that often other than to complete some of the stunt jumps or races that are spread out across the city. Shooting still allows you to target different enemy body parts and you’ll have a lot of different weapons to choose from as well. On the gameplay front, Crackdown 3 still plays like previous games in the series, which sounds good on its own merits, but again, this style hasn’t aged all that gracefully in 2019. I could tell that the developers were purposefully trying to make Crackdown 3 open-ended in this manner, which is great in theory, but it instead just led to me as the player feeling confused as to why there was nothing really interesting to do in this world that dealt with the game’s main path. I know that these complaints might sound unfounded because what I’m describing is somewhat similar to the original Crackdown, but I can promise you that this lack of structure just doesn’t work. There are no specific missions you ever need to do in the game, other than the boss fights themselves which are largely terrible. What’s even more frustrating is that every single one of these objectives are nearly all identical to one another with the completion of each feeling more like busywork rather than being enjoyable and unique.Įssentially, Crackdown 3’s entire mission structure feels like an amalgamation of the side activities that other open world games will throw at you nowadays. Some of these missions or objectives will see you saving imprisoned citizens of New Providence, climbing tall beacon towers, or destroying random vehicles that are stashed away in garages. The issue I have with challenging these, mob bosses, as I’ll call them, is that the objectives you have to complete before fighting it out with each one are downright mindless.Ĭrackdown 3 throws a litany of different tasks at you to accomplish, but none of them are enjoyable in the slightest. As mentioned, you’re tasked out of the gate with traveling around New Providence and taking out many of the different bosses associated with Terra Nova before eventually challenging the organization’s leader. The biggest problem with Crackdown 3 above everything else though is that the game just lacks any sort of structure. If you’re fine with that formula and that’s what you’re looking for, it’s still here, but the surrounding aspects of the game don’t do that base outline any favors. If you like the way in which previous Crackdown games have played out purely on the basis of leveling up and running about collecting orbs, that’s still found in Crackdown 3 and it’s the best part of the game. Before I begin endlessly laying out the issues that Crackdown 3 has, I will say that the leveling structure of the game as a whole is likely its biggest saving grace.