There's a reason they call it "Development Hell." It can't be pleasant working on a game for four, five, even six years before release, constantly trying to hit a moving target that keeps getting further and further away. And if there's any game that embodies development hell in 2019, it's Crackdown 3. Well, maybe that Final Fantasy VII remake as well, and maybe Shenmue 3, and maybe Dead Island 2, and probably Star Citizen. But I'm here to talk about Crackdown 3, which believe it or not I hadn't touched until a hands-on demo session last week here in San Francisco. I'm not going to say I had high hopes going into the demo. Even so, what I played is so bare-bones, such a shadow of everything Microsoft ever made it out to be, I'm just not sure what happened here.

Licensed games all-but-disappeared for a few years there, swept into the trash alongside a bevy of B-tier studios. But I guess they're back--and way weirder this time around, too. Adaptations of both Planet of the Apes and Animal Farm were announced this week, and the Pillars of the Earth point-and-click hit Steam. I can only imagine Ken Kesey's logging classic Sometimes a Great Notion is next. That, plus Destiny briefly sort-of pops up on Steam, Total Warhammer II adds the ratlike Skaven, and Civilization gets adapted into board game form.

Microsoft's biggest hurdle with Crackdown 3 isn't its rumored troubled development cycle, it's that Agents of Mayhem exists and is coming out first. Both share a similar premise: You're a superpowered human given free reign over a cartoony open world. There are plenty of physics-based shenanigans that result from shooting harpoon rifles at snipers and black hole guns at gang members in both, and each has a familiar structure of taking out a crime syndicate from the bottom up. The difference lies in the execution: There are a lot of cooks working on Crackdown 3 -- some brand new to the franchise -- while Mayhem's team is a group of seasoned open-world veterans. Crackdown 3 is being developed by two studios.