Brooklyn 99 sure got very dark very suddenly.
I've actually had a lot of fun with Crackdown 3 because the movement in the game just feels really good. The movement animations just really sell the Agent being a superhuman killing machine because you can do some pretty neat shit like scrabble up a sheer vertical surface a good six feet to grab a ledge that's out of reach, or slide down the side of a skyscraper, or just do midair rolls automatically to jump through narrow gaps. Fall damage still exists, but the game's very generous-I've died only a handful of times from fall damage and pretty much every one of those was falling like, 300 meters straight down or something.
Some people have complained about the ragdolling not being quite as exaggerated as in the first two games, but I actually feel that the limited amount of ragdolling makes melee and collisions feel like they have
weight to them-the physics in this game are pretty solid even in campaign (I haven't screwed around in multiplayer yet). Your blows feel and sound pretty punchy and you get some pretty neat melee moves like a charged-up dash punch and a pretty nasty ground pound that at high levels basically instantly kills everything but elite enemies.
The combat dynamic feels pretty nice. They made it so that gaining XP orbs restores health/shields, which means that the game heavily encourages you to stay mixed up in the thick of it, healing by getting kills rather than disengaging all the time. Your health/shield innate regen is pretty slow and there are aggressive enemies like drones to worry about, so picking off weakened enemies is often a better bet than running away because a single basic enemy kill will easily give you a third of your health or shields back. There's a lot more variety of enemies now, with pretty much every subfaction having several twists on how their guys fight, and there's a basic elemental strengths/weaknesses system that exists and you can take advantage of (robots are weak to most energy weapons, humans are weak to fire and toxic attacks unless they're wearing NBC gear, armored units are weak to armor piercing weapons, unarmored drones are weak to non-armor piercing weapons), but isn't so overwhelming that you need to have weapons of every element or you're screwed. Also some of the weapons are ridiculous, like the rocket launcher machine gun, or the man-portable semi-automatic cluster bomb launcher. Yes, it sounds absurd because it is absurd. They also made it so that your survivability is improved by gaining any skills, rather than just Strength, which means that you no longer spend the first twenty minutes of Crackdown 3 doing weak punches at people so you can get the extra health bars you need to take on harder content.
On the flipside, the driving feels bad because vehicles have extremely wide turn radii and a lot of inertia. Yes, it's
realistic, but it also feels very bad compared to on-foot movement which eventually becomes some insane airdash-jump-chaining with light parkour like this was basically [PROTOTYPE]. The starting weapons are pretty weak, and you're not going to play this game for the plot.
