Possibly interesting if you like to reminisce about what sandbox games were like around the late PS2/ early PS3 era, but you can always just replay Crackdown 1 for that, or keep holding your head underwater till you damage your short-term memory. You're just going from one "shoot all the bad guys" mission to another while all the innocent pedestrians we're ostensibly doing this for are but flakes of dandruff settling on the pubic hair of the world. We've got small sandboxes, sumptuous sandboxes, survival sandboxes, superhero sandboxes I've got so many sandboxes in my house, my cat uses one as a toilet.Īnd Crackdown 3's sandbox is humiliatingly small and uninteresting, with very little personality on a moment-to-moment level. But these days, sandbox games are like chicken: bland, obvious, and there's about three for every human being on planet Earth. "Surely, Crackdown 1 was a good game, Yahtz?" It was, at the time, back before our sophisticated modern age where all races and creeds live together in harmony and everyone understands that vaccinations work back then, the very concept of a "go anywhere" sandbox was still somewhat novel, especially ones where you could jump 50 feet into the air and bludgeon people to death with the corpses of their old schoolteachers.
For it is just basically Crackdown: you jump about the city very emphatically not driving any of the thoughtfully-provided vehicles, collect upgrade orbs, cause chaos until you can take down the local lieutenant, kill lieutenants until the big boss is defenseless, and reload is bound to the left shoulder button, which is exactly the sort of thing we used to do in the olden days before evolution solidified our brain matter. The game proper then begins, and if you played Crackdown 1, slipped on a puddle of your own brackish mung, fell into a coma, and only just woke up in time to play Crackdown 3, you could be forgiven for thinking that in the intervening time, the games industry had advanced no further than a shit-smeared dildo at a relay race. And God bless his little cotton socks, probably thought he was going to be in more of it, but then he's killed off in the crash and largely disappears from the situation while the surviving Agent of our choice washes up ashore and hooks up with the local resistance movement of hordes of idealistic young people. So the intro diligently fails to satisfactorily establish why we hate the villains, and instead spends most of its time establishing that Terry Crews is in this game. I spent the whole game waiting for someone to acknowledge that twist from the end of Crackdown 1 where it turned out the Agency itself were the evil masterminds behind it all, but I think I might be the only person who remembers that. Yes, our helicopter does get shot down on the way in, but that could just have been the city authorities not wanting the Agency to come in and beat them all to death with their own company cars. We don't get to see for ourselves much of the oppression and violence we're told is taking place the most evidence the game presents for us outside of the briefing videos is that the city has police stations.
Or at least, we are given every assurance that they are it's a very "tell, don't show" kind of arrangement. Well, the fact is, time has made a fool of Crackdown 3 clearly, the feeling was that it's been long enough since Crackdown 2 that it was time to bring back Crackdown 1 updated for a new generation, but then someone rested their balls on the piece of paper where they wrote the idea down and obscured the last five words, and then all the scrotum sweat messed up the ink, and after they lifted up their balls, the words had somehow changed to "and put Terry Crews in it".Ĭrackdown 3 is about a glittering future city that was established in the aftermath of a global crisis in which the super-powered peacekeepers of the ever-unspecifically-named "Agency" are going into to start trouble because the people running it are evil. Switch to Contrarian Mode, you lazy asshole." Oh, all right. "Yahtzee, we all know you're being needlessly negative because Crackdown 3 has already reviewed pretty shittily and you're going for the mercy kill. But nevertheless, Crackdown 3 has appeared, and it's a very appropriate title: "down" because that's how it makes me feel, "crack" because anyone involved with it is going to lose all their teeth and end up sucking dick behind the bus station, and "3" which sounds a bit like "wee". Well, frankly, while it has been close to a decade since the last Crackdown and thirteen years since the last Crackdown that didn't suck mouthfuls of used baby wipes from a blocked sewer drain, I'm not sure it's fair to say that anyone's been "awaiting" another one I was content to forget about it and recycle the relevant brain cells to think of more inventive ways to look down ladies' tops without them noticing.