Which will see release first? Star Citizen or Crackdown 3?
Is anyone even interested in this title anymore?
I was for the longest time but not anymore. Iâll just settle with having enjoyed one as a fun game
The apocalypse.
Crackdown 3 Receives Two New Trailers and a New Launch Date at X018
The new multiplayer mode is called Wrecking Zone and it is touted as Crackdown 's âultimate multiplayer combat arena.â In this mode, two teams of five players go head-to-head in a fully destructible environment built with Azure cloud technology.
Crackdown 3 will now be launching on February 15th and will be in Xbox Game Pass from day one.
Dont forget this is also PC too, just not sure if its crossplay or not
Itâs a Play Anywhere title. It is crossplay.
Video games are well known for their celebrity cameos. Just recently, both Gary Busey and Sean Bean have either lent their voice or made an appearance in games. Terry Crews went one step further. At The Game Awards, he occupied an entire new trailer as it was confirmed heâll be assuming the role of Commander Jaxon in Crackdown 3.
Itâs time to step up your boom and head into the Wrecking Zone, although thereâs very little gameplay footage on show:
Terry Crews and Crackdown 3 will be arriving on Xbox One on February 15th, 2019.
Crackdown 3 Preview Reveals Campaign Details
Jeff Rubenstein from Xbox Wire recently got the chance to play a part of the Crackdown 3 campaign and shared some insights about the gameplay experience. The key points are summarised below, or you can read the full article here.
Anyone who has played the previous Crackdown games will recognise that the new game stays true to the spirit of its predecessors. It remains to be seen whether this particular formula for fun still appeals to gamers over eight years after the previous instalment:
- The playable Agents in Crackdown 3 have unique attributes to suit different playstyles and situations. Rubenstein chose to play as Agent Chapman, a female character with +10% strength experience and +5% to firearms.
- Agent progress and game progress are saved independently, and players can switch Agents mid-game by visiting a Supply Point.
- The voice of Commander Goodwin is back to inform, praise and insult players.
- Cars can be used as thrown weapons as well as for transport.
- Choice of loadout is critical to maintaining lethal effectiveness against different enemy types.
- Players must take down a ring of enforcers to get to main boss Elizabeth Niemand.
- Players must eliminate minor targets to gather enough intel to take on higher level targets.
- Agents will often be outnumbered and outgunned, so it is important to keep moving and keep swapping weapons to survive.
- Agents lock on to targets, so players donât need to make themselves more vulnerable by carefully aiming at enemies.
- Agent abilities advance both by earning experience and collecting Orbs.
Crackdown 3 will be released on February 15th as an Xbox Play Anywhere title, and will be available on Xbox Game Pass from launch.
Xbox Insiders Can Play Crackdown 3âs Wrecking Zone Tomorrow
Xbox Wire has just revealed that players in the Xbox Insiders program will get the chance to try out a Technical Test of Crackdown 3: Wrecking Zone, to help ensure a smooth experience at launch for the rest of us.
As the Wire is keen to point out, âthis is not a beta â weâre looking to gather as much information, feedback and bug reports as possible.â With the increasingly vague understanding of what a beta actually is, weâre going to assume that players can expect a higher rate of technical stability issues than the kind of open âbetasâ that amount to full demos.
Installation of the Wrecking Zone Technical Test begins Thursday, February 7 9 a.m. PST/5 p.m. UTC. The first playtests start at 12 p.m. PST/8 p.m. UTC. Insiders will play the Agent Hunter game mode on the Blackout Zone map, where âcombatants score points by taking out opposing Agents and collecting their Badgesâ. More playtests are planned for the weekend.
If you want to become an Xbox Insider you can download the Insider Hub app from the Store on your dashboard.
Crackdown 3 and Wrecking Zone are both due to release straight into Xbox Game Pass as well as retail on February 15th.
Crackdown 3 Launch Trailer Steps Up The Boom
Originally revealed at E3 2014, itâs nearly time for the release of Crackdown 3. As part of yesterdayâs Inside Xbox, Microsoft debuted the gameâs launch trailer. After showing the TerraNova corporation that players will be up against, the Agents initially to do things quietly and âoff the radarâ. Anyone who has played a Crackdown game knows how impossible that is, so itâs not long before the Agents are told to âdo it your wayâ. That way, as one might expect, involves plenty of explosions and destruction. Check it out for yourselves below.
Crackdown 3 jumps onto Xbox One on February 15th.
Crackdown 3: Wrecking Zone Wonât Support Friend Lobbies at Launch
The Crackdown 3: Wrecking Zone Technical Tests have been running over the past week, giving Xbox Insiders the chance to help the gameâs developers work out any kinks before the gameâs release. During the ongoing tests one sizeable omission has been brought to light. Reddit user Branflakes222 posted yesterday that the game lacks a way for players to create a lobby and invite a party of friends to play together.
When the issue was brought up in the Official Crackdown 3 Discord, the serverâs âDirectorâ replied âNo. Wrecking Zone does not support parties and will not at launchâ and âI donât have any info on if/when they might be implementedâ in response to another user.
For a company that has been at the forefront of multiplayer gaming on consoles and has been a leading voice for the virtues of cross-platform play in games such as Fortnite , the lack of a basic lobby system in a first party release does seem odd.
Crackdown 3 is scheduled to release this coming Friday, February 15th.
Crackdown 3 Review
By Mark Delaney, just now
Way back in June 2014, just half a year after the Xbox One hit stores, Microsoft unveiled one of their big first-party sequels. Crackdown 3 was on the way, scheduled to release in 2016. Then it was delayed until late 2017, to launch alongside the Xbox One X. Then, just the multiplayer portion was meant to come out while Sumo Digital finished the story mode. It all got delayed yet again to fall of 2018, and then once more to 2019. Now itâs finally here. That sort of publically problematic dev cycle tends to breed skepticism, and in this case, some feels warranted in the end, but maybe not as much as youâd think. After all is said and done, Crackdown 3 's launch arrives with a signature bang in some places, but a whimper in others.
Note: This review only considers the Crackdown 3 campaign. A review of the gameâs 5v5 multiplayer mode, Wrecking Zone, will be coming later in the week.
You need not have played previous games in the series as what little story there is hardly alludes to any history. The neon-lit, augmented reality infused city of New Providence marks a new home for the super cops known as Agents, but the usual open world gamut is on full display â with towers to scale, enemy territories to overtake, miscellaneous map icons to chase down, and bosses to defeat. Itâs a tired setup but one that can still lend itself to fun moments with the right mechanics, and mechanically Crackdown gets a lot right. Super jumping and air dashing across gap thousands of feet in the air to descend on a gang of enemies with an enormous ground pound feels great. The vertical routes you can take often feel like youâre cheating, but the layout of the city reveals that your unorthodox shortcuts through the city are there by design.
The gun play is always exciting too, simply because the game throws so much at you at once. Itâs remarkable just how stable it all is when you consider other games have had more issues with less action. I witnessed no slowdowns of frame rate in my time even as it felt like an entire city block was on assault and enemies came from every angle. Iâve never seen a game perform this well with so much going on. Crackdown 's combat system is based on crowd control and a shark-like move-or-die paradigm. If youâre not sprinting, leaping, dodge-rolling, and air dashing all while youâre taking aim at the many enemies surrounding you, youâll die quickly. Itâs meant to be played fast and up close. Damage per second improves the closer you are to enemies and you recharge your shield exclusively with kills, so the whole game reminds you of this often.
âDonât slow downâ is your prime directive and Crackdown 3 is better for it. That action only gets more intense as you go too, thanks to your improved powers as well as the more explosive villains. Restarting the game with a new character after I had beaten it once, it was remarkable to see just how underpowered my level one character felt compared to my Agent Jaxon that had taken down the corporate overlords of New Providence.
In New Providence, to slow down is to die.
For all of its flair in gun play and platforming, Crackdown is not without issues in other areas. For one, driving just doesnât feel great. The emergency brake is unreliable at best and that problem is compounded by the unpredictable physics. Hit another vehicle and thereâs no way of knowing how the game will respond. Sometimes theyâll fly over you like youâre a four-wheeled spatula, sometimes theyâll act more like brick walls, or youâll even get your geometry stuck in theirs in annoying ways that slow you to a halt, a cardinal sin in New Providence. Itâs true that the game is mostly played on foot anyway, or at least it can be. But with plenty of side activities involving vehicles, they really need to behave better than they do.
One saving grace of the driving mechanics is your Agency-issued vehicle which can transform into three different types: a speedy race car, a hulking tank or an all-terrain buggy that can drive on the sides of buildings. The adaptability of the Agency wheels is a fun aspect of the otherwise troubled driving mechanics.
The biggest problem facing Crackdown 3 is its surprising lack of character. The flair of eliminating bad guys and traversing the vertical heights of the futuristic world is all but totally lost at ground level. Pedestrians and traffic donât feel dense enough and only the mayhem you cause is ever going to break up the monotony. No one in the city seems to even hint at being oppressed as the story says they are, not even in a blissfully ignorant sort of way. Even the villains mostly feel like they stand around waiting for you to come and destroy them. It doesnât feel lived in. For such a colorful city, its inhabitants sure are boring. Even Terry Crewsâ involvement is little more than an opening cutscene since no matter who you choose as your avatar, they hardly ever speak.
Orbs are back in 1,000 often hard to reach places.
Playing in co-op and using some of the better weapons and equipment makes the game a more interesting playground, but even then the tools at your disposal never feel like they deliver on the premise of being a super cop in a dystopian corporatocracy. In the time since Crackdown 3 was announced, weâve had two Just Cause games do this sort of bombastic action to a much better degree â though it bears repeating that Crackdown somehow never even hints at performance issues during the chaos.
The achievements will come early and often, which is good because there are a massive 70 of them. Youâll be rewarded for doing most anything in the game, from blowing up five cars at a time to wiping the city of all enemy instalments. If playing in co-op, any achievement progress made from one player is applied to your partner. In theory, you could invite a friend to your saved game world, be on the precipice of unlocking a dozen or more achievements, then quickly pop them all to earn them for each of you. Or you could even divide the work to get twice the achievements done in the same amount of time. Itâs like being in two places at once for achievement hunters.
Check out our Best Xbox Third Person Shooters Available in 2018 article for a compilation of other great games in this genre.
Summary
Itâs fitting that just days after Microsoft announced the name change of their internal production branch from Microsoft Studios to Xbox Game Studios, Crackdown 3 's launch screen displays the old moniker. After a year of exciting studio acquisitions for the company in 2018 and a stronger push for first-party moving forward, Crackdown 3 is the last remnant of the bygone era of Smartglass, live-action/video game hybrids, and forced Kinect purchases. It survived the purge where Fable Legends and Scalebound did not, but even in its best moments, Crackdown 3 's campaign feels like it was born too late.
3 / 5
Positives
- Move-or-die combat is fast, fluid, and fun
- Unorthodox, creative platforming in a vertically impressive world
Negatives
- Despite the neon lights and over-the-top character models, it all lacks personality, especially among bosses
- Driving is a chore
- Doesnât reach its potential regarding wacky guns and gadgets
Ethics Statement
The reviewer spent around 20 hours in New Providence, collecting orbs and blowing up bad guys. He gathered 44 of 70 achievements along the way.
Driving in Crackdown was always shit.
Why drive when you can bound endlessly over rooftops anyway.
EDIT: OK, so I drove out of the starting base because it was a fucking long way to walk and there wasnât another way out. I would go as fast as possible until I went over the exit ramp then bail or crash.
Played a bit so far as I have game pass. Its okay but feels like a game that came out years ago. I have only played campaign right now no Multiplayer yet
In all fairness it should of been out a couple of years ago. 
This game will not sell well unfortunately. I LOVED the first Crackdown and didnât even tough those attached Halo beta that they had thrown in.
For those of you that enjoyed the orb collecting to make yourself stronger the addiction is still there. Happily they have made this game more of the first one and not the disappointing second.
I know reviews are weak for thus game but I am thoroughly enjoying it. I want to jump from building to building so I never even think of using the weaker driving portion.
Sadly, with all the delays and likely poor performance of this game I will feel this will be the last sequel in the series.
I am playing thru it since I have game pass and it can be fun. I am killing time till Division 2 comes out. I dont believe I would have paid money for it alone. Its good for some good old fashioned goofing around without the intensity of Apex Blackout etc. So I tend to go back and play thru when I am a little burnt out on intense game play