Crackdown 3 review: Half-baked action with tasty triple-jumping

Enlarge / The views are pretty nice.
Originally announced way back in 2014 for a 2016 launch, Crackdown 3 has certainly taken its time in finally reaching Xbox One and Windows PC players this week. Despite all that time in the proverbial oven, though, Crackdown 3 comes out feeling dated and half-baked—though it's still a fun world to jump around in.
This time around, the super-powered agents of, uh, The Agency, are unleashing their carnage-filled version of justice on the secluded city of New Providence. The metropolis is controlled by Terra Nova, an immensely powerful corporation that apparently organized a blackout of every major city in the world (and incinerated most of the Agency agents dispatched to stop them) in order to attract new citizens to their futuristic haven. Once there, though, these refugees find they're forced to exist as impoverished grist for Terra Nova's economic mill, enriching company executives who live in relative opulence.
The stratified architecture found in the different regions of New Providence provides some important grounding for the battle between the haves and have-nots that the Agency finds itself in. For the most part, though, the game is annoyingly blunt about telling—rather than showing—how your actions are inspiring the proletariat to 'rise up' against their authoritarian masters (throwing in plenty of 'edgy-for-a-thirteen-year-old' random cursing along the way).
Free some dissidents from jail, for instance, and a voice in your ear immediately tells you how they will help 'take the fight to Terra Nova.' But I can only recall one time in my play-through when I actually saw citizens taking up arms against their corporate masters (rather ineffectually, I might add). Shut down a mining operation for Chimera—a poisonous weapon Terra Nova gathers for vast profits—and you're reminded how it will disrupt the company's plans without ever really seeing that effect in the city itself.
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