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.
Functionally, the only thing the other agents do is increase the exp rate of a couple of skills by 5%/10%, right? Or are there other reasons to use other agents too?
As best I can tell, the only real difference between agents is the percentage increase in their particular skills. And if you’re going around doing everything and picking up orbs, probably that doesn’t end up making much difference. So mostly cosmetic.
Oh, another thing they retained from the earlier games - your player character gets bigger as they power up. Not just the freakish arms and chest I mentioned earlier, but go stand your character next to a passing pedestrian - they get taller too! I love details like that.
I didn’t realize my character was getting physically larger, but I did notice I was 7-8 feet tall compared to the normies.
I’m glad they mentioned the auto-lock on aiming in Wrecking Zone since that was a bananas design decision and makes the experience kind of a joke.
Joe Staten said that the thinking behind that, was to make strategically breaking lock-on (by, say, running through the wall of a building) part of the game’s meta strategy layer. Take that as truth, or as an ad-hoc justification for an underwhelming MP mode - your choice.
I think the cloud physics tech is cool, and I’ll be interested to see how games next generation can leverage it in ways that are more ambient, and less glorified tech demo, like Wrecking Zone. Just being able to crank up the physics simulation in games like that with no “local” performance cost, could have a lot of cool applications in different genres.
Moving back to Crackdown 3 - I personally think the single player should have been standalone (it’s already a separate install), and should have been $30.
The multiplayer mode should have been turned into a free download for all XBL Gold subscribers, just so they could see the cloud-tech in action, play a few rounds, and move on - hopefully hyped about the future of Azure cloud physics. Maybe even include a “Demo Mode”, where you can just play with the physics simulation, with some metrics on screen about what it’s rendering, what the “cloud” is doing, etc. You take the crummy MP out of the “value” conversation around the game, while still acknowledging that Azure physics are real, and letting people see for themselves.
Of course, that wouldn’t do anything for outlets like IGN, who still incredibly gave the single player mode a 50%.
Well, I’ve MAXed out all my skills, completed the campaign 3 times (one on each difficulty) and have collected around 180ish/250 hidden orbs.
Unfortunately, Legendary mode is a cakewalk for a fully-leveled Agent (except for Ngata, fuck that guy, omfg), and there’s not much left to do but find the remaining orbs.
I might be done with the game for now. Hunting for moons orbs would be more fun if the AI were a challenge for my main agent, and I don’t want to start another.
All in all the game was fun, it exceeded my modern expectations (but fell far behind my 2013 expectations), it’s a solid $30 game (being sold for twice that in order to trick people into thinking Gamepass adds hueg value).
I also loved the massive draw distances, the art style (especially at night, and explosions, and mech enemies), and the music.
Not a perfect game, but a good game for Gamepass… which isn’t exactly what I wanted from a new Crackdown, but I’ll settle for what I got. I do feel bad for anybody that paid full retail though.
This video actually shows what I mentioned before, that buildings have indestructible steel frames meaning you can’t do the kind of bottom up destruction of a building delivered in Red Faction: Guerrilla, or the early Crackdown 3 teasers.
Given the size, including the much more than usual versatility of levels free aiming would be really hard for the average gamer. This isn’t CoD were its mostly players 20 feet from you on the same ground.