The original Crackdown was an instant classic on Xbox 360, and now having had a chance to play the latest entry at E3 2017 it’s safe to say Crackdown 3 retains the explosive gunplay, high jumping excitement, and exhilarating superhero aspects from the original and has dialed them up to 11.

This time around, the year is 2045, and it’s your job as a member of the Agency, an elite taskforce made up of super Agents to uphold their unique brand of justice, to find those responsible, eliminate them, and restore peace in New Providence, a city oppressed by TerraNova, a shady criminal empire.

For our demo, we participated in a single-player Skills for Kills challenge in which we had 10 minutes to unleash as much chaos and mayhem as possible to upgrade our agent’s skills. Like the original game’s mechanics, how you evolve your agent is by focusing your actions on those that compliment a particular skill. For example: to upgrade your firearms skill, use the over-the-top weapons to take out baddies, improve your driving ability by using vehicles to run over enemies, or increase your agility by obtaining Agility Orbs hidden in high to reach (but not impossible) places hidden throughout New Providence.

Zeroing in on the many red dots on our mini-map, we sprinted over to these locations to find several enemy soldiers lying in wait, guarding power nodes. We quickly tossed a couple of grenades at their feet, kicking off a series of cascading explosions as one by one the red dots began to vanish (we were doing our job, the Agency would be proud). We took out our shotgun and dispatched some up close and personal justice until an enemy dropped their rocket launcher. We then unleashed a volley of rockets at the remaining red blips, one of them missing their target that hit a parked car, setting off another series of booms, flames, and screams from the terrified citizens as successive cars continued to explode around us.

Having been a tremendous fan of the original, we felt immediately at home jumping around, firing weapons, and picking up large steel containers and flinging them at masses of enemy soldiers (gaining some points to our strength skill). We also locked eyes on a couple of Agility Orbs, encouraging us to scale a few tall buildings to pick up these addictive collectibles. After just a few minutes of gameplay, it’s clear that this is a true return to form of the open-world sandbox gameplay we enjoyed years ago.

Through our actions, it didn’t take long until we received our first agent upgrades, indicated by a large pulse and a slightly beefier agent, improving our firearms skill that increased the amount of damage our weapons unleashed. Like before, we turned our attention back to the many other red blips (a.k.a. enemies who were soon to be decimated) and sprinted to their location to continue our playthrough.

As an Xbox Play Anywhere title with cross-save and cross-play support, Crackdown 3 will give us many more opportunities to bring the boom solo or with four-player online co-op over Xbox Live on Xbox One, Xbox One X, and Windows 10 when it comes out November 7.

We’ll have more to share on Crackdown 3 in the coming months as we near its release date. In the meantime, stay tuned to Xbox Wire for further news on this exciting exclusive game and all of our news coming from E3 2017 this week.