Crackdown 3: XBox One Review

Crackdown 3: XBox One Review

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Platform: XBox One

Quite frankly, Crackdown 3 looks out of place on the XBox One platform.

Cartoony in extremis, with hardly any lyricism gone into its execution, visual or otherwise, the game feels out of place in this current generation.

A long time in development, the game's simple MO is a case of shooting, collecting orbs and jumping higher than you ever have before. It's not exactly taxing, nor in many ways does it remotely purport to be.

You get to play an agent in New Providence, a city that looks like it's a cartoon Blade Runner, complete with refugees circling around. Gaining powers from collecting orbs, and various agility points, you get to take out a series of bosses and unlock the world around, while fulfilling the high points of a fairly generic story that feels like it's ripped from the 1980s.

And in many ways, the gameplay mechanics all feel ripped from the 1980s too - you have to collect ammo by clicking a button, rather than running over it, and you can lift and hurtle objects in the most rudimental of ways.

It all seems so familiar and yet also so depressingly unoriginal.

A mix of Saints Row silliness and cartoon edges, Crackdown 3 has potential. There's some joy to be had in the bounding around, shooting and collecting, but it's a fairly hollow pleasure to be frank.

You won't sink hundreds of hours into Crackdown 3 - in truth, you may only just cobble together a few of fun before tedium sets in. Free on the GamePass service, it's probably at a reasonable price, because as a standalone release, it's got the feel of something that's sorely out of touch and ever so slightly three decades too late.