Crackdown 3 tech analysis: a console classic reborn?
The journey towards Crackdown 3's release has not been a smooth one - but after some four years in development, the game is finally complete. Its troubled history and dodgy trailers left us concerned about the quality of the final product but as it turns out, the campaign portion of Crackdown 3 is actually an accomplished and often beautiful game, using Unreal Engine 4 innovatively to deliver a unique visual style, paired with the best HDR implementation we've seen since Gran Turismo Sport. Whether Crackdown 3 delivers as a sequel comes down to how closely wedded you are to the original's chaotic anything-goes open world and the introduction of more structure here. Opinion may be divided on this one, but the core gameplay delivers much more than I expected, and I think one of this game's strengths is just how much of an actual sequel this is, as opposed to a reboot or a 'reimagining' of one of Xbox 360's finest hours.
So, what is Crackdown 3? It's well known at this point that the 'power of the cloud' destruction demo shown back in 2015 has not been fully realised in the final game, certainly not in its campaign segment. And this is fascinating because Crackdown 3 is, in effect, two entirely separate games created by different companies seeking to deliver their own unique experience. They're even separate downloads on the Xbox Store.
The closest relative we get to the initial 2015 demo is Wrecking Zone - a destruction-driven multiplayer game that only opened up to reviewers in a very limited fashion less than 24 hours ago. We'll be back on that soon, but our emphasis in this piece is on Sumo Digital's work on the single-player/co-op portion of the package, which is essentially, what Crackdown 2 should have been - a revamped, upgraded sequel to the original game with an emphasis on high-speed traversal and verticality.
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