I can warn you off of paying full price for Crackdown 3, but I can’t say it’s not worth ten bucks and some free time this weekend. Where once a game like this might have been criticized - for its brevity, its thin premise, and the fact that it won’t hold most players’ interest for more than a couple of days - those qualities now seem like intentional strengths, and a bit insidious.

With the latter option in mind, Crackdown 3’s averageness, its B-grade forgetability, seems to herald a new experiment for video games by transposing streaming television’s idea of “good enough” entertainment into the gaming sphere.

Now it’s Crackdown’s turn to be the Trojan horse: You can pay $60 to own Crackdown 3 outright when it debuts this Friday, or you can access it through Xbox Game Pass, a $10-a-month subscription service not unlike Netflix. The beta offer was a Trojan horse, helping Microsoft launch a brand-new franchise off the back of an existing giant. Rockstar managed to release Red Dead Redemption 2 last year, setting a new bar for obsessive attention to detail in open-world gaming.īefore that, back in 2007, the first installment in the Crackdown series sold a lot of copies, not because it was any good, but because buying a copy guaranteed access to the multiplayer beta for Halo 3. There have been two more Despicable Me films (three if you count Minions). Since that summer, Obama won a second term, and then we got a new president.

Here is what the world was like when the second installment of Sumo Digital’s Crackdown series was released in the summer of 2010: Barack Obama was in the midst of his first term, the first Despicable Me topped the box-office charts, and a scrappy little open-world game called Red Dead Redemption had been released a couple of months prior.

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