Crackdown Agility Orbs

Collectibles Done Right

With December rolling in we all inevitably start looking back at the year 2019, and as people start compiling their game of the year list there is one title that will undoubtedly be missing from these lists; Crackdown 3 came out to what we’ll describe as less than stellar reviews but if you had the right kind of expectations there was dumb fun to be found with it. Regardless of the reviews there is one factor of open world games that Crackdown excels at, and that is collectibles.

The main collectibles of Crackdown are agility orbs; these are glowing green orbs that you’ll find in places like the corners of rooftops. This is one of the elements about them that works well; the choice of the green colour makes them visually stand out from the environment. To add to this even if an orb isn’t within your vision if you are within the vicinity of one it has a distinct sound effect that plays cluing you in to search the area for one. This allows the game to avoid the usual pitfall of players missing collectibles and having no idea where to look.

Of course if a player is going to hunt around to city to look for these it needs to be fun to get around and to collect them. The unique selling point of Crackdown is that you are a super powered peacekeeper with one of your main powers being a super jump. This is pretty fun as it gives the game a kind of looser platformer feel. With this style of movement the developers were able to place the orbs in such a way that they can present some basic puzzles platforming challenges to figure out how to reach them keeping the collecting engaging.

One last element that benefits the agility orbs is that there is a tangible reward to collecting them. The power of your super jump is dictated by your agility level. The main way of getting the experience points for this is collecting these orbs. There are only a small number of agility levels so when you do level up it feels like a significant power up, and allows you to collect more and harder to reach orbs. Another factor to this is that the harder to reach orbs will net you more experience, this helps to offset the usual problem of exponential requirements of levelling up, rather than just needing to collect more orbs to level up you can instead focus on getting the orbs that give you more experience points.

While Crackdown 3 got a lot of understandable criticism I was happy it maintained the quality design of the agility orbs, meaning that when playing it I quickly fell into the old habit of ignoring whatever mission I was doing because an agility orb was near and then when I got that one I saw another one and then another… someday I’ll finish that mission.