Sumo Digital and Xbox Game Studios’ Crackdown 3 is currently available for the Xbox One family of home consoles and on Windows 10 for PC. The release seems to be one of the most understated promotions under the Microsoft wheelhouse, given that on the day of the release Microsoft promoted an interview with Ikinema over the actual release of the game itself.

The interview covers the way Ikinema utilizes the dynamic ledging system for characters utilizing the game’s verticality to scale the environment, as well as being able to climb, jump, grab, and grip ledges and edges without massive clipping or animation discrepancies.

The full interview is 13 minutes long and is posted over on the Ikinema YouTube channel.

The interview covers how Sumo Digital utilized various middleware toolsets like Ikinema, which makes use of Ikinema’s RunTime middleware to allow player characters to connect to any protuberant surfaces.

The inverse kinematic procedural adjustments are made to give the characters and world a believable sense of parkour.

Now in order to prevent glitches and avoiding design burdens, the system is setup where any ledge with a specific set of extruding parameters will automatically allow players to latch onto the surface. This completely reduces the time-staking task of having to manually tag each and every ledge, each and every climable surface, or object to make it scalable. It greatly reduces development time and costs.

But beyond the development it’s kind of weird that Crackdown 3 seems to have completely flown under the radar, almost as if Microsoft is ashamed of the third-person, open-world shooter.

Then again, according to some walkthroughs the game is just under four hours long, so I can see why it’s not being talked about quite as much as some people might have hoped for.

Anyway, the game is available right now on the Xbox One and on Windows 10 for PC for $59.99. It’s definitely one of those games where you’ll want to watch plenty of Let’s Play videos and read plenty of user reviews before deciding to lay any money down on the game.