【suicidal eroticism】

Crackdown 3is basically a can suicidal eroticismof Pringles in video game form: rapidly consumed, only vaguely satisfying, and completely forgotten within minutes.

The pitch is pretty much the same as it was in 2007 when the original Crackdownlaunched: you're a superhuman crimefighter in a futuristic city. You start out more powerful than the average human, and over time your abilities increase as you do things connected to each skill category.

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So if you shoot a lot of bad guys in the head, your firearms stat goes up. Beat baddies into submission or throw mailboxes and cars at them, you'll get stronger. Leap your way to the tops of buildings and collect agility orbs you find, and you'll be able to jump higher.

For all that 2007's Crackdowndid to deliver superheroic crimefighter wish fulfillment, the various elements that made the older game pophave been improved upon in the intervening years. Crackdownis yesterday's news, so it stands to reason that Crackdown 3would aim to raise the bar.

Sadly, that's not the case.

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Crackdown 3comes with the same premise as the original game: the city is trapped in the grip of a vast criminal enterprise, and it's on you to save everyone. To do that, you'll have to work your way up the criminal food chain, taking down various low-level officers until you can convince one of their bosses to take notice.

The Terra Nova organization you're working to bring down splits up across three divisions: security, industry, and logistics. Each branch has low-level underbosses and a proper leader, who reports up to the big boss. You can tackle branches, and even bosses, in any order -- though taking out the weaker ones first gives you an easier time with the tougher ones.

Crackdown 3doesn't feature the traditional mission-based structure that many other open world games do. All of Terra Nova's operations are spread across the city, so it's on you to just explore, find these points of interest, and stage an attack. Sometimes your goal is to free prisoners or wreck infrastructure.

As you clear out different sets of Terra Nova operations, you open up boss fights. The first thing I did in Crackdown 3was regain control of the city's monorail network. That meant finding my way to five separate train stations and taking out the officer stationed at each one. Once I finished, the monorail boss -- an A.I. located near the center of the city -- appeared on my map.

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Crackdown 3 is basically a can of Pringles in video game form.

Every set of activities connects to a proper boss fight, complete with intro and death cutscenes -- the only ones in the game, really. None of them stand out in any particular way. It's a struggle to recall the specifics of even the latest, arguably toughest fights in the game without double-checking my notes.

Boss encounters ought to be a culmination of previous challenges, something that tests what you've learned along the way. But most of the grouped activities boil down to "go to place, kill all the things, hit a button or shoot a weak point when applicable." There's nothing to learn; it's all just the same shit over and over again.

There's only one example that strays from this formula. Terra Nova's propaganda machine is fueled by 12 towers scattered around the city. Each one is a jumping puzzle that distills Crackdown 3's focus down to one of its greatest strengths: movement. It's the lone standout activity in an otherwise dull lineup of boxes that need to be ticked before you beat the game.

You can also play through the entire story mode with a friend at your side, though it's an odd backward step for the series. Crackdownsupported two players in co-op. Crackdown 2supported four. And now, Crackdown 3... supports only two again. It's undeniably more fun to play this game with a friend, but the experience as a whole is too shallow for another player to really shake up how you approach things.

There's also a baffling feature -- something I didn't even discover until after I finished the game, mind you -- that allows you to unlock new agents with different ability advantages. That would be cool in a game that doesn't feature Terry Crews as a playable star, but why would you ever want to switch away from him? Especially when the stat boosts on other agents are relatively small (and the experience as a whole is so shallow).

That shallowness also unfortunately extends to Crackdown 3's two competitive modes, which pit teams of five against one another in slimmed down maps filled with fully destructible buildings. The raw pleasure of leaping around like a badass super-cop is still there, but so is the lack of depth. With only a handful of weapons to choose from and no sense of progression -- there's nothing to unlock, no treasure trove of toys to look forward to -- the welcome wears itself out after just a few matches.

That's an even greater shame when you consider the fact that Crackdown 3was originally pitched on the virtue of its destructible world. Years spent in development eventually relegated that feature to the competitive modes only, but it quickly becomes clear in the finished game that breaking apart skyscrapers with powerful guns, while cool, doesn't really bring anything fresh or original to player-versus-player experiences.

Just as it was in the original game, exploring rooftops to find and collect agility orbs in story mode is the stickiest aspect of Crackdown 3. It's fun to treat rows of towering skyscrapers like your own, personal jungle gym. Especially since you see demonstrable progress as you collect those orbs, with your jumps getting higher and previously inaccessible rooftops suddenly appearing beneath your feet.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned propaganda towers represent the only serious tweak to the Crackdown formula. Crackdown, the first one, got away with being a shallow game where it just felt funto move around the world. Crackdown 2essentially copied that approach a few years later and it fell flat.

Now here we have Crackdown 3arriving almost 12 years after the first game... and it's still the same damn thing. The Infamous games have done this schtick better. So did 2018's Spider-Man. And plenty of others. It's been 12 years, folks.

That's why Crackdown 3didn't do much for me. Newer games with fresher ideas are piled up in my ever-growing backlog and screaming for attention right now. I didn't sleepwalk my way through the whole day I spent -- yes that's all it took, this is a short game -- bringing down Terra Nova and completing every optional activity on the map, but that time could have been better spent.

I don't hate Crackdown 3. I don't hate chemically grown snack chips either! But in both cases, there are countless other options to choose from that are vastly more memorable and satisfying.

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