I stare at the pantheon of great open-world games and wonder, why does Crackdown 3 exist? Every building unlucky enough to be a live capture zone ended up utterly gutted. Destructive environments turned the second game type I played, Territories, from a standard king-of-the-hill capture mode into something much more interesting. Dodging behind buildings and using vertical space to get behind enemies turns every fight into a three-dimensional furball of explosions.Įvery surface in Wrecking Zone is also completely destructible, and crumbling buildings and shattered walls add to the chaos. The same auto-locking aim system is in play here, which makes for a weird dynamic: how do you play a multiplayer shooter if everyone is 100 percent accurate all the time? The key to surviving in Wrecking Zone is movement. Badges time out after a few seconds, so defending a fallen ally's badge is a good way to deny the enemy team a point. This makes a sniping a bad strategy-killing someone without being close enough to grab their badge won't make your score go up. One, called Agent Hunt, is a standard team deathmatch mode with a twist: dead agents drop their Agency badge, and you have to collect it to score. During a pre-release session, and then a little more after release, I played two game modes. Teams of agents pile into a training simulator to duke it out. The attached multiplayer mode, called the Wrecking Zone, is actually more interesting than the campaign itself. When I attack monorail stations, I have to do enough damage to the security forces there to draw out the station chief, a high-powered robot equipped with a shield. The ore processing pits, for example, can only be destroyed by tossing boulders into huge hydraulic mashers to clog them. I appreciate that each installation type demands a different strategy. Roxy is the only artificial personality, while the rest are a diverse group ranging from prize-winning chemists to decorated former army officers. To Crackdown 3's credit, the boss characters are varied and fighting them is a good change of pace. Weakening the middle managers makes their bosses more vulnerable, and so on up the corporate ladder. ![]() Attacking mines and destroying machinery, for example, weakens the middle manager in charge of mining operations. I fight to make the CEO vulnerable by attacking company assets. ![]() ![]() The other, more interesting addition that came with Crackdown 3 Extra Edition is Keys to the City which will likely translate to a sandbox version of Michael Bay's wet dream.Instead of fighting gangs or terrorists as in the previous Crackdown games, Crackdown 3's baddie is an exploitative capitalist megacorp. In general, these new cosmetics seem to be a waste of time and resources for the developers but it is here nonetheless. Cosmetic incentives are fine on their own but Wrecking Zone proved to be uninteresting and bland to players, hinting that the real problem could be solved by making the content actually interesting instead of paying players in cosmetics to mull through boring PvP that can't even be accessed most of the time. Players can use it to unlock cosmetics but most of them seem to be simple retextures rather than actual new armour models so it is hard to gauge if this will pique anyone's interest.Ĭonsidering it sometimes takes literal to get into a match, it's hard to imagine the wacky skins will make it worth the players' time to grind them up. Fighting other players will award Agency Points, a fancy way of saying PvP progression currency. Microsoft's studios are working on salvaging the situation and have added a progression system to Wrecking Zone. Still, the latter seems to have a bit of a community left which is not the case for Crackdown 3's multiplayer. Crackdown 3 turned out to be one of the major flops in 2019 whose failure was rivalled only by Anthem so far.
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