Crackdown 3 - By whatever means necessary

I wanted to check out someone streaming the multiplayer destruction stuff.

Zero.

I don’t know twitch at all, maybe I was looking in the wrong section …

I see one guy streaming it right now, but it’s in Finnish.

I will take a shot at the MP though. Yea the destruction is nice but not that impressed otherwise. There’s just two basic modes so not much variety. Also I have constant network problems. It always says my connection is “poor” but other games work fine. Also have gotten disconnected many times when as match is being setup with the generic “network error”. Think I’ll just stick with single player.

People scream and cry when you simply walk past them. Killing them just gets you a stern warning but nothing worse. Killing the armed militia members will actually turn them against you for a time.

All in all, if you listen to the orders being given by Neimand (the endboss), you’ll notice they sound pretty much the same as the orders you’re given. And she even gives directives to her people to protect citizens (even if only so they still have human cattle to play with, but still).

Also, Agency goes out of his way to dehumanize every opponent you face, going so far as calling certain bosses stuff like “A human piece of shit.” And he emphasizes rumors, like other bosses being outright prison cannibals.

The majority of the enemies you kill in certain zones are blue collar workers just going about their day, and Agency even refers to certain faction grunts as rough necks.

You’re all about liberty, if it fits within Agency’s vision for the city, but most of the time you’re an eco-terrorist with a body count in the thousands.

When you say “the Agency” referring to the people or the bosses or your enemies a certain way, you’re talking about the Voice of the agency, Goodwin right? Because Jaxon is all about truth, justice and the American way, as long as it’s applied through ass kicking. And the other voice in your ear, whose name I forget, but the Indian sounding woman who revives your charred corpse at the beginning of the game - she seems to think you’re an instrument delivered to help give power back to the masses. Which so far, I’ve been doing exactly that. Again, I’m not all that far in, done maybe the first four or five territories working clockwise out from the starting position. Things may change.

I’ve never understood a single line of Jaxon’s dialogue because they buried his voice too far into the audio mix. All I know is he does the Angency’s bidding and is never shown to balk at killing anyone or anything.

And the woman isn’t part of the agency, she’s a third party only involved because she reanimated your dead corpse. (Although, after finishing the campaign, maybe her future status will change in DLC or a sequel).

As of right now, the entirety of the Agency is basically a reanimated army of undead, plus the guy that talks in your ear (and only credited as “Agency” on IMDB. I didn’t remember his in-game name).

I recall getting a warning about killing civilians (I’m a huge explosives fan) because it would be hard to win “hearts and minds”. I think I heard it just once, even though I have been basically spraying grenades every which way without care. I’m pretty sure that I kill less civilians than bad guys though (for now).

I’m replaying the campaign and am about half way through it. Goes so, so fast when I already know what to do.

I noticed that when I was taking over a transit station, I could hear the enemy Lt for the area giving orders and saying something to the effect of “We need to protect these stations because they help us supply slaves to the quarries.” Two seconds later I’ve taken over the station and I’m at a quarry next door, where the workers are being ordered (by their own LT) that they will be killed if work is disrupted and they don’t take me out. And what is Goodwin saying while I’m annihilating the people stuck in these forced labor camps? He’s raving like a maniac, “Burn! BURN!! BURN IT ALLL, HA, BWA HA HAW!”

Once I’m in the main office in the center of the map, the Lt there (Varga, I think), is screaming that she’s going to kill everybody and make them suffer if they don’t do their best to kill me.

I mean, sure, I gotta defend myself while blowing up work sites and installations, but most of the goons seem to be slave labor defending themselves under penalty of death.

Goodwin takes a distinct pleasure in everything I destroy and everybody I kill, and only reminds me to tone it down a little when I’m just blowing up random cars on the freeway.

It’s so great to have this new big playground to explore. This is something that just never felt right in Crackdown 2. It felt like a combination of a place I’d already explored and a place I didn’t want to hang out in. But in the new sequel, it’s like the original Crackdown again: a whole new place where I’m jumping toward the camera to avoid the ledge above me and then going back away from the camera to grab the ledge. Yay! Got it!

I have taken over 3 monorail stations now. One of the first trucks I drove was one of those vehicles with a huge ramp on the back. So I’ve been trotting that one out a few times now so that I can use it to jump the ramp and get through those huge hoops in the sky. It always bothered me in the original Crackdown that I never got those. Having access to that ramp truck from the beginning has been great.

I also really love the look of the game. In the bright sunlight I love the sun-backed look of the city, and at night, I love the lighting and the details. The city really shines at night. The graphics look way better than the original Crackdown, and yet, they still preserve the feel of the original look.

I really hope the better reviews get out there soon. The launch reviews were brutal, and now that I’m playing, seem unjustifiably so.

Yeah, this is exactly what I wanted from this game. Really glad to have Game Pass. This is more Crackdown, with better graphics. Everything feels exactly the way I want it to; it’s got just the right amount of jank to it. These meat and potatoes games seem to often get nuked by reviews, who either want everything to be AAAA $100m+ budget, or off the beaten path indie. This game may be workmanlike in construction, but it’s exactly the kind of palate cleanser I want in between super big budget titles with a million mechanics, or the tiny walking simulators I’ve checked out recently.

Love the campaign mode (I’m done with the story znd now just playing it like Super Mario Odyssey and collecting moons orbs).

But the Wrecking Zone mode is just trash and should have been scrapped.

I have a ton of thoughts about the main game, but my overall feeling is that it’s gotten a raw deal from reviewers, in no small part due to Microsoft’s bungled messaging for it all along.

I’m not a guy who likes to measure time spent or fun had vs money spent, but I do get where people who put $60 down then blew through the game in a weekend are coming from. I felt much the same after the second game was released. But man, playing this on Game Pass is such a bargain and I can wholeheartedly recommend trying this out if you’re already a member or ok with coughing up the $2 for 2 months deal.

I am a guy that likes to measure time spent vs money spent, and I’d be furious if I paid $60 for this game. It’s a bargain title through and through, but bargain in the way a 10ton twin-stick shooter or SHMUP is a bargain game (super fun, but thin on content). I think this game could do so well building around its actual gameplay loop more.

If does what it does well, imho, but it doesn’t capitalize on it and I think a lot of players are confused about what they’re actually getting.

You’ve already run through the entire campaign and started again. I think that says a fair amount about the enjoyment you’re getting from the game.

The game definitely starts out really rough, since the game doesn’t really get fun until you power up your character a bit. But now that I’ve spent ~2 hours with it it’s really ramping up!

Which is a lot of enjoyment if my posts haven’t hammered that home yet.

Speaking of enjoyment, all of my skills except for driving are finally maxed. Driving is just over 5, and was mostly propped up by collecting hidden orbs.

I love being max skill, and it’ll make my Legendary playthrough a blast. One thing I wish this game borrowed from DOOM 2016 is doing away with reloading. Reloading takes way too long here, since I want to keep the action going and going. The game does well rewarding me for kills by recharging my health after every kill, so it keeps the action going that way too, and rewards me for charging into a fight instead of away from one (unless I’m running from a Boss and charging into Grunts for a refresh), but there are tiny little things that just slow everything down in a bad way when I’m really going at it. Stuff like reloading, falling into and jumping out of water (slow animation for this), and being unable to throw objects like cars when I’m too close to some random polygon or enemy. There’s a couple other issues too (like there being NO SPLASH DAMAGE on vehicle rockets… ugh), but those are the main ones.

Now that all my ammo is regenerating, I never have to stop the fight to scamper off for more ammo either. I already use the matter clone grendades (whatever they’re called) simply because they regenerate in my inventory, but endless ammo will be good too.

GO GO GO GO, that’s my motto.

“Justice, by any means necessary.” - Goodwin

I played a bunch of this yesterday and had a blast. I’m kind of amazed that this game has the capacity to surprise me - I took out a missile platform in the northern part of the map, but that activated missile platforms in other parts of the map that fires at me relentlessly until I took them out, which required me to investigate the eastern half of the map. And I hadn’t really explored much over there just yet so I wasn’t kind of running scared past objectives (and enemies) popping up all around me. It was awesome!

Got a couple skills up to level 5 and I’m gratified to see that there are hidden level 6 skills that aren’t shown on the skill tree until you ding 5! I won’t spoil them because it’s cool to see for yourself but they look really fun to try.

I got the ability to slam into the ground yesterday. God, I love it. Get to the very top of a tower, and then jump off and slam into the ground. BAM.

Also the game taught me how to get an agency vehicle finally. (Use the d-pad, and it comes to you!)

The agency vehicle is really weird this time.

Forgot to mention, I started cheating on Terry Crews and tried out other agents. I think I like the female agents because they just seem more normally proportioned - the male characters have massively overdeveloped upper bodies that look kind of weird.