The only exception is when it comes to increasing your agility, which doesn't require killing at all. Instead, green collectible "agility orbs" litter the world's hard-to-reach places, and are ingeniously placed so that once you've grabbed one you're usually in just the right spot to see another. Several times I had to force myself to stop mechanically hunting orb after orb and get back into the main game.

The main downside here is that the things you'll be doing most - like jumping and shooting - are rarely fun owing to the repetitive missions structures and objectives and very basic controls. Killing a horde of robots at one of the many monorail stations, for example, is general just a matter of running a loop around the building and alternating taps on the left and right triggers to shoot enemies in the head. This is compounded by the fact that you gradually unlock the fun abilities and weapons as you go, so the early going is dull indeed. It does eventually hit something of a stride, with some good weapons allowing for genuinely creative destruction, but even at its best Crackdown 3 feels like a big chest of explosive, physics-driven toys to play with in a playground that's left wanting.

That's particularly true of the online competitive mode, which is hosted on powerful servers with the promise of destructible environments too complex for a console to process locally. But in practice matches are repetitive kill-fests with none of the play and experimentation that makes the campaign occassionally satisfying. A lot of the level is destructible, but crashing through it has all the impact of dropping a piece of styrofoam off a couch or tearing a brown paper bag in half.

There's a spark of something alluringly fun at the core of Crackdown 3, but the bulk of the actual content just isn't strong enough to nurture it. Progress is slow, combat is repetitive, getting around can be janky, graphical detail is minimal and the constant chattery jokes fall mostly flat. Even the effervescent Crews is underutilised here, resigned to providing little more than some catch phrases and his likeness for one of the several mostly-mute playable characters. It's clear the aim here was to evoke the early era of open-world games, but unfortunately there's just not much interesting being done besides that.