E3 2017 - Behind Closed Doors With Crackdown 3

Crackdown was a game that I loved, long before every game became open world, Crackdown had a lot to do, but even better was that you could play how you wanted to, power up your strength and start using cars as weapons, it was great. When the second game came, I never saw enough of a difference between the games to warrant jumping in again, but after many years off, does Crackdown 3 have me wanting to return?

I had the chance at E3 to sit in with some of the developers from Sumo Digital as they explained more about the game and what they were aiming for with the final release, right of the bat, I should point out that the much-touted destructibility was not presented. They reasoned that with the Single Player experience, given the freedom that people will have to direct the story and events how they choose, telling a player to go to a mission on top of a building that they have demolished would not be possible.

What really stood out from my time with the game was that just how much the world is reactive, not in a sense that people will fear you, but if you start to focus on a singular enemy, they will increase their presence everywhere they are, in order to combat the amount of damage you are doing to their business. While they may ignore you for a while, they will eventually increase the level of protection that their locations have, though if you manage to liberate a location, you can gain resources and more importantly reduce their threat to the world.

In the build I was shown, when you made yourself to be too much a nuisance, specialist equipment might be called in, which in this instance was mounted to special cars that ran on the elevated train tracks, which meant randomly, if we were not paying attention, we would get randomly shot out of the sky, the way to stop that was to take over the train station. Doing that had a double impact, first of all, it removed the attacks from the enemy, but also replaced their units with Agency resources, allowing for a much larger presence to be felt by the people in the area.

The entire time that I was being shown the game, I had the feeling that this is just Crackdown 1 but with slightly better visuals, I did not see anything about the game that really impressed me, but given the games multiplayer focus, I would hope that changes when playing with friends. Of course, given the open nature of the world, there seems to be a lot more focus on player choice and not just in how you level up your character. So come Gamescom in August, Microsoft really need to impress as right now, what is here is ok, but nothing to special.