Xbox One Review – ‘Crackdown 3’
By Like other open-world games, Crackdown 3 doesn’t directly block you from exploring. Certain areas have stronger enemies, but that doesn’t prevent you from exploring. Exploring (and doing) is how you level up your primary attributes. Want to jump higher and farther? Collect agility orbs. Want to be more effective with guns? Use them. The system works, but the game design doesn’t scale with your powers — with the exception of throwing more enemies at you.
Even in the very last level of the game, when the Agency boss was telling me that I wasn’t leveled up enough and should come back later, it was easy to fight my way through the tower because I could pick enemies off from a distance. It’s the same technique I was able to use for most of the game. I could usually see (and lock on to) enemies before they could see me. As a result, I moved forward a bit, shot a few baddies, stepped back, and repeated the cycle again. Progression through the levels in the world was usually straightforward, with the challenge being the boss fights. That’s not due to a skill requirement, but the boss fights ramp up the challenge because they dump extra sets of grunts at you in an attempt to overwhelm.
What’s surprising about all of this is that while your guns can lock on, your traversal does not. Even when you’ve leveled up your agility score, it’s still easy to overshoot a ledge. Given that Crackdown 3 has multiple sections where you need to hop from narrow beam to narrow beam, this will likely be a source of some frustration. Your character is supposed to be a super agile fighter, but he can easily overshoot a short hop.
