Crackdown 3 review: Crackdown 3 Review — IGN

Crackdown 3 Review — IGN

Crackdown 3

Crackdown 3’s mediocre, collectible-heavy campaign and poor multiplayer are rarely satisfying busywork.

By Brandin Tyrrel

Posted: Feb 17, 2019 11:44 pm

Because Crackdown 3’s modes are so different (and we didn’t get access to multiplayer ahead of time), I reviewed each of them separately. You can find the individual reviews below for my in-depth thoughts on each piece.

• Crackdown 3 – Campaign Review
• Crackdown 3 – Wrecking Zone Multiplayer Review

This final, full Verdict and score at the bottom covers the entirety of Crackdown 3, but is not an average of the two. Though the Wrecking Zone multiplayer is bad, it’s such a tiny slice of the whole package that its presence doesn’t weigh Crackdown 3 down too much.
Loading«On paper, Crackdown 3’s single-player campaign checks all the boxes that made the original an enjoyable game – but playing through it is about as exciting as running down a checklist and becomes downright repetitive after the first few hours. Its second-to-second combat is uninteresting outside of a couple of boss fights, and even though there’s a compulsive satisfaction to be had in crossing off its many itemized activities, it’s never any more than that.»Loading«While the environmental destruction of Crackdown 3: Wrecking Zone is impressive, it misses every opportunity to use it in interesting ways to enhance the otherwise barebones and uninteresting multiplayer combat, where aiming is all but completely automated. You can see everything Wrecking Zone has to offer in about 30 minutes, minus the time you’re going to spend matchmaking after every round. Unless a lot changes, Wrecking Zone just isn’t worth the time it takes.»

All these years later, Crackdown 3 delivers on what made the original an enjoyable game, but never much more. Though the compulsive hunt for collectibles can be satisfying for a time, its overall campaign doesn’t evolve beyond a mostly bland auto-lock shooting gallery. Its tacked-on Wrecking Zone multiplayer highlights some neat cloud-powered destruction that’s never used to great effect in this tiny and woefully barebones mode.

In This Article

Crackdown 3

Sumo Digital

Feb 15, 2019

Rating

ESRB: Mature

Platforms

PCXbox One

Crackdown 3 Review

mediocre

Crackdown 3’s mediocre, collectible-heavy campaign and poor Wrecking Zone multiplayer are rarely satisfying busywork.

Brandin Tyrrel

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Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey — Official Trailer

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Even with Terry Crews, Crackdown 3 fails to reach the highest agility orbs.

Our Verdict

Repetitive and middling, Crackdown 3 is a totally average open-world game that doesn’t give itself a way to stand out.

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Need to know

What is it? Third-person open world action starring Terry Crews and an evil AI.
Reviewed on: Windows 10, i5 4690k, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 970
Price: $60/£50
Release date: Out now
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Developer: Sumo Digital
Link: Microsoft Store  

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As I punch, stomp, and shoot through waves of defense bots, I’m transported to another time. Not the far future of Crackdown 3, where a reanimated Terry Crews is wrecking an evil AI, but the old days of open world games—2007, a million years ago in videogame time. It was a simpler era for the genre, when big cities and cars that blow up were enough to be novel.

Crackdown 3 is never bad, but it’s hard to take much interest in it here in 2019. Big open-world games have changed a lot since 2007, but Crackdown hasn’t, leaving its latest supercop adventure looking good, playing smoothly, and offering nothing new enough to make it exciting.

Corporate strategy

After the whole world’s electrical power gets shut down by a shadowy island city-state called New Providence, the super-powered cops of the Agency are deployed to strike back. Mayhem ensues, the agency strike-ship is shot out of the sky, and years later an insurgent scientist reanimates the corpse of Terry Crews to fight against the ruling powers of New Providence, including an AI named Roxy.

Crackdown 3’s story is as threadbare, bizarre, and stupidly charming in a B-movie kind of way. The point is that New Providence is ruled by the mega-corporation Terra Nova, and you’ve got to dismantle it. The city itself is a wide-open circle of skyscrapers and shanty towns, and within minutes of getting through the dockside security gates, I steal a car and drive around the loop highway circling the entire island. From a familiar over-the-shoulder third-person perspective, I climb office towers, jump over rows of townhomes, and start blowing shit up. 

That’d be fun if the the moment-to-moment combat weren’t such drudgery. Right-clicking to aim enables an aggressive auto-locking system that takes all the fun out of shooting. The ease of aiming does make it possible to jump and dodge incoming fire while pulling off impressive headshots and satisfying explosive kills, but it wasn’t long before jumping started to feel like mindless bunny-hopping, and the feeling of drudgery returned.

Instead of fighting gangs or terrorists as in the previous Crackdown games, Crackdown 3’s baddie is an exploitative capitalist megacorp. I fight to make the CEO vulnerable by attacking company assets. Attacking mines and destroying machinery, for example, weakens the middle manager in charge of mining operations. Weakening the middle managers makes their bosses more vulnerable, and so on up the corporate ladder.

To Crackdown 3’s credit, the boss characters are varied and fighting them is a good change of pace. Roxy is the only artificial personality, while the rest are a diverse group ranging from prize-winning chemists to decorated former army officers. I appreciate that each installation type demands a different strategy. The ore processing pits, for example, can only be destroyed by tossing boulders into huge hydraulic mashers to clog them. When I attack monorail stations, I have to do enough damage to the security forces there to draw out the station chief, a high-powered robot equipped with a shield.

I hop around the city getting into scrap after scrap with Terra Nova forces. I collect cars and guns and quickly get a bit bored. Even though there’s traffic on the roads and civilians on the sidewalks, the town feels strangely empty and lifeless. The weapons I’m gathering feel more or less the same, and none of them are overwhelmingly awesome.

On the other hand, Terry Crews is great as the voice and face of the default main character. If he were a bad guy, I’d say he was chewing the scenery, but as a protagonist it’s more like he’s giving the scenery a pep-talk. He’s the scenery’s sergeant and he wants the scenery to know that it can do anything if it applies itself. He’s overacting, basically, in the hammy kind of way that only a friendly guy like Terry Crews can pull off. It’s all about physical lung volume when you’re operating at those levels of intensity—and Terry’s got lungs for days.

Wrecked

The attached multiplayer mode, called the Wrecking Zone, is actually more interesting than the campaign itself. Teams of agents pile into a training simulator to duke it out. During a pre-release session, and then a little more after release, I played two game modes. One, called Agent Hunt, is a standard team deathmatch mode with a twist: dead agents drop their Agency badge, and you have to collect it to score. This makes a sniping a bad strategy—killing someone without being close enough to grab their badge won’t make your score go up. Badges time out after a few seconds, so defending a fallen ally’s badge is a good way to deny the enemy team a point.

The same auto-locking aim system is in play here, which makes for a weird dynamic: how do you play a multiplayer shooter if everyone is 100 percent accurate all the time? The key to surviving in Wrecking Zone is movement. Dodging behind buildings and using vertical space to get behind enemies turns every fight into a three-dimensional furball of explosions.

Every surface in Wrecking Zone is also completely destructible, and crumbling buildings and shattered walls add to the chaos. Destructive environments turned the second game type I played, Territories, from a standard king-of-the-hill capture mode into something much more interesting. Every building unlucky enough to be a live capture zone ended up utterly gutted.

I stare at the pantheon of great open-world games and wonder, why does Crackdown 3 exist?

The fragility of the buildings opens up all kinds of creative attacks, such as shooting the floor out from under someone or blowing through a wall to attack an enemy from the side. By comparison, the singleplayer campaign is tame and uninteresting, with far less demolition to enjoy.

The campaign just fails to distinguish itself in our post–Saints Row 4 reality. Back in 2007 and 2010, Crackdown filled a niche. Agents don’t exactly have superpowers, but through their high-tech suits they’re able to do classic Superman antics like picking up cars and jumping tall buildings in a single bound. Back then, we’d never seen open-world games that made you a god of the city you explored.

2014’s Saints Row 4 dialed the superpowers up to 11. You could run so fast a sonic shockwave destroyed all the cars you passed on the highway; you could punch or throw people into craters in the ground. You were absolutely all-powerful, Superman by way of Neo. Plus, it was funny, with self-aware guns like the Dubstep Gun and ‘Merica. It tweaked the genre with a rush of unrestrained joy.

Now Crackdown 3 comes along 12 years after Crackdown but without 12 years’ worth of new ideas to share. Crackdown 3 isn’t sardonic like GTA V, it’s not immersive like Red Dead Redemption 2, it’s not whimsical like Breath of the Wild, and it doesn’t go buck-wild like Saints Row 4. I stare at the pantheon of great open-world games and wonder, why does Crackdown 3 exist? It’s not bad. It’s an OK game that could’ve been exciting a decade ago, but comes off today like a shrug carried only by the energy of Terry Crews.

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Crackdown 3

Repetitive and middling, Crackdown 3 is a totally average open-world game that doesn’t give itself a way to stand out.

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AMD Ryzen 5 5500 review and test — i2HARD

The release of the Ryzen 5000 line at the end of 2020 marked new heights of performance. The bar of price tags also shifted up by $50, but the real cost was even worse, and many were waiting for the replenishment of the line with younger processors. Despite the regular rumors about the ryzen 5 5600, months, quarters passed, and there were still no new products. And now, after a year and a half, AMD has finally introduced the budget Ryzen 5500, 5600 and 5700X. And if the last two are slightly underclocked 5600X and 5800X, then the Ryzen 5 5500, the hero of today’s review, is the offspring of the 5600G, devoid of graphics. nine0005

Recommended price pleases. It is almost 2 times cheaper than the 5600X, while it also has 6 cores and 12 threads on the Zen 3 microarchitecture, but the maximum frequency is 400 MHz lower. The affinity with the 5600G means a lot more differences. The most critical of them is the size of the L3 cache. Its 2 times less. PCI-Express is also not new: the 3rd version, with the existing fifth or the 4th in the last generation, is not impressive. However, there are also several advantages. Here, a single-crystal layout, not a chiplet one, which should have a positive effect on temperatures. Also, two memory controllers have not gone away, allowing you to work in 1 to 1 mode with RAM at much higher frequencies, but more on that later. nine0005

Contents:

• Test bench
• Stock tests
• Benchmark tests
• Temperatures and consumption
• Tests in games
• Cost and test results in stock
• Acceleration
• Benchmark tests
• Tests in games
• Single Rank vs Dual Rank
• Conclusion

Test bench

Let’s start, as always, with the stock. Classic XMP 3200 MHz CL16 will provide two single-rank Crucial Ballistix modules on Micron Rev.B chips with a total capacity of 32 GB.
nine0005

Ryzen 5 3600 and 5600X to mark the frontier, and the i3-12100 as the blue camp opponent. The cooling system is one of the best tower coolers with four heat pipes ID-Cooling SE-224-XT Black v2. The rest of the components are in front of you, the operating system is Windows 10.

• Video card: Palit GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GameRock OC
• Processor # 1: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
• Processor # 2: AMD Ryzen 5 5500
• Processor # 3: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
• CPU #4: Intel Core i3-12100
• Motherboard #1: ASRock B550 Taichi Razer Edition
• Motherboard #2: ASUS TUF Gaming Z690-Plus WIFI D4
• RAM Crucial Ballistix WhiteBL2K16G32C16U4 System cooling: ID-Cooling SE-224-XT BLACK V2
• Storage: Crucial MX500 2 TB
• Power supply: Deepcool DQ850-M-V2L
• Chassis: Open Stand
• Operating system: Windows 10

Tests in stock

Tests in benchmarks

There is not much interesting in Hades. The higher latencies and slower cache speeds of the 5500 compared to the 5600X are due to lower core clocks, and full write speeds are a matter of architectural design, none of which will be critical in most applications.

In CPU-Z, the almost equal frequency of 3600 and 5600 leads to only a 10% difference due to the microarchitecture, 5600X demonstrates the result by the same amount more simply due to the frequency. The 12100, of course, is not able to compensate for the lack of two cores with their performance, so it falls well behind in the multithread test. nine0005

In Cinebench R23, the load is higher, so the ryzens, due to the power limit and higher temperatures, lowered the frequency, especially the 5600X, due to which the gap between the i3 and the six-cores was reduced.

A varied set of small Geekbench benchmarks scaled by memory speed and AVX-512 instructions allowed the quad-core to catch up with the ryzens, with the 5500 barely outperforming the 3600 in the multi-threaded test.

The rendering of the project in Adobe Premiere Pro is also almost indistinguishable in terms of speed between 3600 and 5600. And the result of the other participants is not very different. nine0005

Temperatures and power consumption

The temperature and power consumption test this time turned out to be perhaps the most unpredictable of our experience. Let’s start with the fact that the 3600 is incredibly hot. Yes, we have a budget tower for four heat pipes, but even under LSS it is decently heated. It is very likely that the thermal interface under the lid is defective, because in our review of the 5600X we also compared it with the 3600XT, which was much colder. The surprises don’t end there. The 5500, unlike the 5600X, with a much higher voltage for the same 6 cores, does not hit the power limit, has 15 watts lower power consumption, but is still hotter than the 5600X. i3 turned out to be the coldest, despite the thermal paste under the cover, according to our assumptions. nine0005

Tests in games

Next, as always, games.

Cyberpunk graphics preset: ultra ray tracing, RT reflections off, DLSS: ultra performance, high crowd density. The vast majority of games parallelize worse than synthetics. Cyberpunk is no exception, so high performance per core, coupled with a fast memory subsystem, gives the i3 an edge over the younger ryzens. On average FPS 5500 is in the middle between 3600 and 5600X, but on rare and very rare events statistics it is closer to 3600.

Far Cry 6, ultra preset, DXR reflections and shadows enabled, HD textures disabled. This game parallelizes worse, so the advantage in the number of cores is minimal here, but high performance per core due to microarchitecture or banal frequency allows the 5600X and 12100 to gain a significant lead over the 3600 and 5600. The frametime on the i3 is the most even.

Shadow of Lara, highest graphics preset, resolution modifier 20%. While there was only a mountain in the field of view, the 5600X filled itself with an average FPS due to the large L3 cache, surpassing the 5500 in this indicator by a third, but when the camera dropped to the market, its FPS was already less than 20% higher. And the lag of 12100 has become less than 10%. The power consumption of the novelty is ridiculous, a little over 30 watts. nine0005

StarCraft II, all settings maxed out. In dual-threaded play, the ryzens feel free to maintain their max clock while the i3 sticks to an all-core boost due to the little background activity created by monitoring. However, the i3 is only marginally behind the 5600X, while the 3600 and 5500 are well behind.

Total War Saga: Troy, ultra preset, grass and units: extreme, resolution and anti-aliasing to a minimum. And here is an exception to the rule — a game that looks more like a synthetic test than a game benchmark. No amount of high IPC saves the i3 from missing two cores. The 5500 is again closer in performance to the 3600 than to the 5600X. nine0005

CS:GO, minimum settings, maximum textures and anti-aliasing. The solid 32 MB L3 cache of the 5600X was ideal for this shooter, due to which it is 1.5 times faster than the 3600, but according to the statistics of very rare events, they are almost equal. i3-12100 does not shine with a large cache. Only 12 MB, but the ability to use it, as well as fast cores, helped to bypass the first two ryzens, and at less than 1% and 0.1% it leads in this quartet.

On average for the ward, it turns out that the new product is a little faster than the ryzen 5 3600 and it is still far from the 5600X. 12100 still outperforms it in most games. The only exception is Troy. If you believe that all games will be like this in the future, then choosing six-core is a priority for you. nine0005

Cost and test results in stock

However, one more important parameter must be taken into account — cost. The recommended prices are one thing, but the real ones. However, the price tag is inadequate. Even with a more expensive motherboard, the 12100 looks much more attractive than all the ryzens.

If you consider Aliexpress, then 5500 costs almost the same as 3600. If you are not embarrassed by PCI Express 3.0, then it is better to choose it. Paying a little over two thousand for a 5600X or 5600 is worth it. As for the 12100, it is undoubtedly cheaper. And if you take it for the sake of “here and now”, then even with a more expensive motherboard it is more profitable. However, a lot of motherboards based on the B450 and B550 chipsets will allow you to upgrade to some 5800X3D, while a budget motherboard based on the H610 chipset will not withstand anything more than 12400 without limits. Yes, and the memory is not particularly chasing. nine0005

Also, don’t forget that i3 is not as strong in rendering as it is in games. Here six-core is preferable. But keep in mind that this is Aliexpress with its risks. We ordered 5600, and 3600 arrived instead.

Overclocking

Now about overclocking. For the Ryzen 5 3600 and 5600X, the memory setup came out the same. This is 3800 MHz with the first timing of 14. The cores were overclocked in different ways. If for the 3600 the only option was to fix the frequency at around 4300 MHz, then for the 5600X they made the adjustment through the Curve Optimizer. nine0005

On the 5500, single rank ballistics feel great. In our case, we managed to take 4733 MHz in 1: 1 mode with the first timing 17 without any problems. A further increase in frequency requires a much higher voltage on the SoC. At the same time, the cores turned out to be stubborn, so they also tuned them through the Curve Optimizer.

The limited voltage on the SA of the i3-12100 around 900 mV allowed us to conquer the same 3800 MHz with the first timing 14, as on the first two ryzens. There is no processor overclocking here, and he does not need an undervolt, so there are no changes here. nine0005

Benchmark tests

In AIDA64, the new product demonstrates decent memory performance, but in terms of latency, the result is almost the same as that of the 5600X.

In CPU-Z, the choice of overclocking via Curve Optimizer resulted in an increase in the lead from 3600 in the single-thread test and to a decrease in the multi-thread test.

In Cinebench, the 5600X no longer hits the power limit, so its lead hasn’t been shaken.

But in Geekbench i3-12100 weakened. Memory tuning on ryzen’ah gave a much greater increase. nine0005

And only in the premiere, an additional gigahertz of the memory frequency allowed the 5500 to outperform the 5600X by a couple of seconds. Let’s remember this one victory.

Tests in games

Cyberpunk also loves high memory bandwidth, but 5500 average FPS remained exactly centered between 3600 and 5600X, however, the statistics of rare and very rare events became closer this time to 5600X. The i3-12100 received less overclocking, which forced it to drop to third place.

In FarCry 6, the quad-core intel continues to breathe in the back of the 5600X. More memory overclocking and a 200 MHz increase in the maximum core frequency did not help the 5500 and it is still slightly faster than the 3600. Only small bursts in frametime are at the 5600X level. nine0005

There were no cardinal changes in the chest either. The strength of the 5600X cache is undeniable, so the FPS 5500 is again much closer to 3600, and the i3 was outperformed only in the most difficult section, and even then by a couple of frames.

Surprisingly, in Starcraft i3-12100 caught up with 5600X in average FPS, although before that memory overclocking gave the second a bigger boost. And the increase in frequency on ryzen did not foreshadow the loss of superiority. But life is full of surprises. The result of 5500 was once again not surprising.

In Troy, high memory bandwidth allowed for 5500 FPS average between 3600 and 5600X. Before that, it was closer to 3600. i3 was completely behind. If in stock the 3600 was only 10% faster than it, now the gap has increased to 25%. nine0005

In counter, the 5600X received an increase only from tuning via PBO. For other processors, memory overclocking gave at least something. However, the layout has not changed. 3600 and 5500 are almost equal, and 12100 has not lost second place to anyone in average FPS and less than 1%, as well as leadership in statistics of very rare events.

The average value for all games only confirmed our observations. The position of 5500 has not changed much. It’s still slightly faster than the 3600, but well behind the 5600X. 12100 has become closer to it, and the gains from overclocking also speak of this. Despite the plus gigahertz in memory compared to the 5600X, overclocking gave 5% more FPS on average FPS. 12100 also received a little, and this despite a good controller by the standards of non-CPUs. nine0005

Single Rank vs Dual Rank

Another fly in the ointment for the 5500 is the fact that dual-rank memory will run noticeably worse. Recall that the participating ballistics on Micron Rev.B chips are peer-to-peer. The same modules may contain more well-known Micron Rev.E chips. Such modules are already dual-ranked, and the frequency of 4333 MHz with the first timing of 18 turned out to be the ceiling for them. Gear Down Mode is not disabled on them, so CL17 is unattainable in our case.

And despite being dual-ranked, performance is lower with these modules. While on rivals with their 3800 MHz ceiling, the result will be better or at least not worse. Dual-rank modules based on Samsung B-Die chips are even worse in frequency. There was no launch above 4000 MHz. Therefore, keep in mind that the high memory frequency for the 5500 is achievable on peer-to-peer modules. nine0005

Conclusion

Who is the Ryzen 5 5500 for? For those who can’t or don’t want to pay extra for 5600 or 5600X. For those who are looking for a more promising upgrade compared to i3 with a budget board. Or for someone who does not have 4 cores. If it costs not much more than 3600, then the novelty will be faster. And, finally, for enthusiasts who want to play with high-frequency memory.

AMD Ryzen 3 3100 Overview. Top for a budget PC? — Page 3 of 6

AMD Ryzen 3 3100 is offered as a BOX version with a simple cooling system included (Wraith Stealth, a bar of aluminum without tubes and a copper base) for a little more, and also in a Tray version, sometimes referred to as OEM, without a cooler. In our case, the Tray version is considered.

Image source Techpowerup

First of all, it is worth dealing with the notorious question “what’s under the lid?”. It is not known for certain, but most likely there is thermal paste. This is clearly hinted at by operating temperatures even in stock mode. At 65 watts TDP (and these are honest TDPs), with cooling in the form of an Ice Hammer IH-4400 A, the operating temperature is 75 degrees in stock. Yes, this is not an EK-component LSS, but it is a normal heat pipe tower cooler with a 120mm 2000 rpm propeller. With a BOX cooler, the result is about 80 degrees. nine0005

Such operating temperatures are the result of one of two reasons: either AMD, at least for the Ryzen 3 3100 (although the Ryzen 3 3300X is also subject to the heating problem), takes crystals of simply terrifying quality, or under the “thermal seal” cover. Judging by the available potential, and a considerable, and too sharp increase in temperatures from an increase in voltage, the second option is more likely.

As a rule, there is no point in overclocking Ryzen processors of any generation. These megahertz are too hard, and the actual performance gain due to tricky boost mechanisms turns out to be criminally small. In the case of multi-core Ryzen, it is more competent to use specialized power plans and other tricks for optimizing the operation of the processor, leading to both an increase in frequencies and a drop in voltage, and with it heating and consumption. By the way, not so long ago, AMD updated the chipset driver package, integrating the right power plans directly into Windows. nine0005

To my surprise, the AMD Ryzen 3 3100 turned out completely different. There is potential! And by Ryzen standards, even impressive, but without raising the voltage, there will be no kin.

So, stock Ryzen 3 3100 “boosts” up to 3.9 GHz across all cores at 1.15 V. We managed to get 4.3 GHz at 1.315 V. In this mode, TDP increases to ~ 80 W, and work temperatures in stress tests up to 80 degrees. Even 4.4 GHz at 1.33 V are possible with operating temperatures already under 84-85 degrees. It is possible that the processor is capable of further overclocking, but the cooling system needs a completely outstanding class. Temperatures grow exponentially with increasing voltage, and to take 4.5 GHz, the voltage must be raised much higher. nine0005

As a result, 4.3-4.4 GHz is the «ceiling» for most systems. High operating frequencies require significant investments in motherboard and cooling. After 4.3 GHz, the game is not worth the candle. Fortunately, each copy is capable of 4.3 GHz — a statement based on a good dozen reviews of this processor. BOX cooling system is not capable of such feats. 80 degrees in stock and under a hundred in overclocking — alas, the processor turned out to be hot.

As a member of the Ryzen 3000 series, the processor under review has received an updated DDR4-3200 memory controller capable of more. In our case, a 2x 8 GB memory kit was launched in DDR4-3333 mode with the usual timings of 16-18-18-36 CR1.