The following will be required to play Crackdown: one Xbox 360 console, one controller, a hard drive or memory card and one extremely creative imagination.
Crackdown is the latest Grand Theft Auto-esque ‘sandbox’ game for the Xbox 360 – that is, you’re thrown into a big, beautiful, deliciously destructible digital domain, and it’s up to you to decide what you want to do, as well as when and how to do it. The ‘why’ just isn’t all that important.
But whereas GTA and more recently Saints Row each had their own very specific story and missions based on one main plotline, Crackdown is all about experimenting with the abilities your character gains as you play. Yes, GTA, Saints Row and Crackdown are all open-ended and you’re never forced into doing anything, but in Crackdown, even when you’re just fooling around, you’re still accomplishing something that will help you later on in the game. Well, most of the time anyway.
Crackdown’s storyline is as thin as a homeless meth addict. You’re a cop who is part of The Agency - a futuristic, unified police force that was put together after crime slowly but surely started to take over around the world. Now, as a last-ditch effort, The Agency is beginning to use agents that are cloned from a line of genetically-altered superhumans. This is where you come in. As one of these super agents, you’re tasked with cleaning up Pacific City, a city that is divided into three sections – Los Muertos, The Volt and Shai-Gen. Each section has six minibosses each plus its own crime lord.
You have the ability to upgrade your character in five categories: firearms, explosives, agility, driving and strength. You start out fairly weak, barely able to reach two storey buildings in one jump or pull off a decent 180 in your Agency vehicle. The more enemies you kill and the more special bonus items you find, the more explosive (literally and figuratively) your abilities become.
Best of all, you control how fast each ability powers up. If you want to focus just on firearms, simply make sure to do nothing but shoot enemies. If you want to become a master behind the wheel, make sure to run over enemies while driving as well complete special driving races. If you want to become an explosives expert, make friends with your high-powered weapons and grenades. You get the idea.
In case you haven’t figured it out already, one of the main differences between this sandbox game and the others already mentioned is that in Crackdown, you’re the good guy. Sure, you can kill innocent civilians, but kill too many and The Agency will send hit squads after you. Rest assured it’s no fun running from the bad guys and law enforcement. This is where one of the problems in the game lies – a lot of the time it’s extremely difficult to not kill innocent civilians. There are a ton of them walking the streets at any given time and it’s damn near impossible to get them out of the way while you’re trying to complete a driving race. The same problem happens when you’re trying to bomb a group of enemy vehicles parked on the street. Sure, your rocket launcher will do a fantastic job of destroying all the bad guys, but the explosion will also mercilessly take out any and all random humans walking and driving around nearby. And when you kill civilians, you get ability points taken away. Boo-urns to that.
When you first start playing the game, it may seem fairly simplistic and downright empty compared to Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row. There isn’t a constantly-evolving storyline to follow here. To complete the game, it’s simply a matter of finding 21 bosses and shooting them to smithereens. With the exception of only a handful of the 21, most of the boss battles all follow the same basic routine – load up on ammo, take on hoards of baddies protecting the boss (who is almost always holed up in a small room somewhere), then shoot him or her with everything you've got.
But sprinkled in among those basic tasks are plenty of other cool little things. Rooftop races have you jumping, climbing and running your way through the city (which itself is one big obstacle course). Road races are the same idea, only you race in – you guessed it! – a vehicle. Both of these types of races can be very fun, but many of them do seem to tread the line between challenging and downright frustrating. One misstep on a roof or one turn into a dead end, and an 11-minute race goes down the tubes and you’re forced to start over again if you want the ability points.
In addition to finishing these races to inch your way closer to more powerful abilities, there are also agility orbs and secret orbs all over Pacific City. These juicy little glowing circles can be found all over the place and it’s a game in itself trying to not only to see where these things are, but to actually get to them. Some of them are almost taunting you with how close they are to reach, but if you can’t quite make it, you’ll have to find a completely alternate route to it, whether it’s climbing an adjacent building, stacking up some objects to make those extra few feet, or using a friend to help you.
Which brings us to the other highlight in Crackdown – the online co-op mode. You know how two heads are better than one? Well, same goes for two overactive imaginations. If you can manage to get another free-thinking gamer into the Crackdown campaign with you, the fun factor can easily be increased ten-fold. Sure, the aforementioned boss battles are more easily finished with two supercops, but it’s all the extra stuff you can do with another person that makes the co-op almost unbearably fun (and hilarious!).
The great thing is, gamers can jump in and out of co-op sessions at their leisure – no need to mess around with lobbies or matching up skill levels. And once two players are together in Pacific City, they’re not forced to do anything together. One player can be off fighting the Los Muertos final boss, while the other player can be running over innocent civilians and running rooftop races in Shai-Gen. It’s completely open-ended, and this is something we hope to see a lot more of in future online co-op-enabled games.
Crackdown looks great, with some absolutely stunning draw distances – again, both horizontally and vertically. Though the environments are very detailed and realistic, the humans and vehicles have a cel-shaded look, making it seem like they’re almost drawn into the world like a comic book.
The sound is also just as satisfying, with explosions, tire squeals and voice acting (especially the unnamed narrator) all combining to make the game that much more enjoyable. The same can’t be said for the in-game music though - let’s just say that I’ve never used my Xbox 360’s custom soundtrack so much before.
The only other complaints we have with the game is that there is no character customization whatsoever. You can choose from one of eight character models but it would have been nice if we could customize someone we could really get attached to and be proud of when we jump into an Xbox Live game with a friend or a stranger. It’s also kind of lame that after taking out all the bosses in a given area, enemies are then completely non-existent. Kind of takes the fun out of things when you have a ton of high-powered weapons and a fully-loaded firearms rating and you can’t do anything with them.
None of these problems, though, take away from Crackdown being a truly fantastic experience that is so much more than just a mindless shoot-em-up GTA clone. The developers almost force you to think outside the box and not spend an hour doing mindless actions that are on-par with running over hookers and throwing molotov cocktails into a crowd on the beach (as fun as those things are).
Crackdown has plenty of differences from other games in the sandbox genre. Despite this (and maybe because of this), it should keep fans and non-fans of this open-ended type of game addicted for many, many hours.
WHAM! Rating: |
8.4 out of 10 |
ESRB Rating: |
M (Mature 17+) |
Official Web Site: |
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