'Crackdown 3' - Back On Duty

Hello, and welcome back to Second Chances where the maligned, forgotten, and ignored get another tour of duty.

Let's face it; promises can be problematic things. It's very easy to promise more than can be realistically delivered, and failing to satisfy promises can multiply failures exponentially. When added in with the almost excessive hyperbole typical with game criticism, you can easily see a game that's just underwhelming suddenly get treated like it's the second coming of Superman 64. I saw that happen with 2019's Crackdown 3.

I follow a lot of game critics on YouTube including Jim Sterling, Angry Joe, Yahtzee Croshaw, ProJared, and Dreamcastguy. Just about all of them absolutely annihilated Crackdown 3, giving the long-delayed sequel prominent places on their "Worst Games of 2019" lists. As much as I like their work, I have to contradict them on this one. I've been having a blast with Crackdown 3! Is it a godsend for the Xbox One? No. Did it fail to deliver on some of its promises? Yes. Does that make it utter crap worth trashing on every YouTube channel? Absolutely not!

The biggest broken promise with Crackdown 3 is with the scale of its multiplayer; so, let's talk about that first. The game was promised to take advantage of Microsoft's cloud technology to provide huge dynamic battlefields that could be blasted to pieces in real-time, similar to what the Battlefield: Bad Company games did but much bigger. That didn't happen. "Wrecking Crew", the competitive multiplayer mode, used smaller maps than promised that had their destructibility curtailed. While it doesn't come close to what was promised, it isn't bad, either. Disappointing, sure, but not bad.

The other big complaint is that the main campaign is too similar to the first two games, making this new one feel like a rehash. I'm sorry, but they're only similar if you don't look closely enough. I actually find the campaign more energized and interesting in this one. Sure, there are still the Agility and Mystery Orbs to find, and the five upgradable traits are the same as in the first game all the way back in 2007. However, more content has been jammed into this new city than was even possible in the first two games. Even though the quests and subquests fall into about seven categories like breaking agents out of jail and destroying factories, there's tons of variety within those categories. No two quests are exactly alike, even if the base concept is the same. It's like how golf is the same game but the courses can be very different from each other. There's also more variety with the playable agents and weapons, with plenty of each to find throughout the city. I haven't had this much fun just exploring and trying everything since Yakuza 0!

Crackdown 3 was just a victim of its own PR. Because so many grandiose promises were made, what was a fun yet underwhelming game suddenly became an irredeemable trainwreck in the eyes of the gaming press. This game simply didn't deserve the absolute bashing it got over the past year. In fact, I've been having more fun with it than with many of the games on those critics' "Best of 2019" lists! If you can find it for a bargain or if you have Xbox Game Pass, give it a try. You'll be pleasantly surprised!

What do you think? Any other games the critics have been too harsh with? Let me know, and game on!