More than four years after it was first shown and after more than five years of development, Microsoft is finally publishing Crackdown 3 on the Xbox One and Windows PC on February 15.
It’s a big moment for fans who have waited a long time since 2010’s Crackdown 2 and 2007’s Crackdown. Your job in the pulpy campaign is to be a “superheroic agent of justice ripped out of a comic book,” said Joe Staten, creative director at Microsoft Studios on the game, in an interview with GamesBeat.
I’ve played a few snippets, including the beginning, a slice of the open world, and some multiplayer combat. It’s a bit of a wacky comic book game, and it starts out with some bombastic speechifying by a digital version of Terry Crews.
Crackdown 3 comes with a 15-hour-plus single-player campaign where you get to play as an agent in the open world of New Providence, a neon-lit city controlled by the mysterious organization Terra Nova, which has built its own company-owned city-state on an island. It has working-class districts and places for the super-wealthy, but apparently everyone can afford multicolored neon.
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One by one, you take down the crime bosses of the city and solve its mystery. You can play one of 21 different agents, and switch between them at any time you come across supply points in the city. I’ve embedded a video of the prologue in this story. It gives you a flavor of what the gameplay is like, and how it slowly onboards you to teach you how to play the game.
As I noted before, if the Marvel universe has an analog for Crackdown 3, it’s Deadpool. When you blast enemies with a rocket, civilians on the streets with scream and the enemies will fly backwards with the blast. But you’ll collect their goodies in a colorful wisp and move on to the next prey. Crews, as the voice of a Marine instructor, motivates his fellow agents, and you can drive heavy vehicles over other cars if you like.
Crackdown 3 is a lot like living in a comic book. You are always awash in a sea of colors, and you have no shortage of guns, ammo, and goons to shoot.
Here’s another video of my earlier gameplay in the multiplayer Wrecking Zone. With multiplayer, the full Havok physics engine runs in the Azure cloud, allowing cloud processing to contribute to your experience on a single machine. That means that objects in the world have realistic physics, or realistic for a comic-book universe. So if you shoot a rocket at something, it will punch a hole in that thing, which could fall on a character and cause damage.
And here’s another video of my gameplay after the beginning of the game, from a preview event with Microsoft in San Francisco.
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhZ7bJmgRIw
And here’s still another video of me blowing up stuff in the open world.
http://https://youtu.be/MRhnqqC3STg
We’ll have more on Crackdown 3 in the coming days.
