Crackdown 3 coming on November 7, starring Terry Crews

It's been a long time since we've seen Crackdown 3, but it's come back in the best possible faction: with Terry Crews yelling in our faces. The trailer that played at Microsoft's E3 press conference today starred Terry Crews as a character named Commander Jaxon. It also starred a whole lot of guns and explosions. In other words: yep, still very much Crackdown.

Familiar elements spotted in the trailer include:

  • A cel shaded comic book art style, but with notably more detail than the previous generation Crackdown games
  • Explosions
  • Agility orbs
  • Jumping high, and also far
  • Several guns
  • Throwing cars

There's also some melee combat, agent superpowers, mechs, and a hell of a lot of explosions with pretty particle effects. Did we mention those?

The one thing conspicuously absent: environmental destruction, which was the major selling point for Crackdown 3 back in 2015. The ability to push destruction to a new extreme was also a big talking point for Microsoft's cloud computing initiative, which we haven't heard about much since...well, 2015.

We'll undoubtedly see more of Crackdown 3, and scrutinize its environmental destructibility, before its release on November 7, 2017.

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).