Driving game, party game, sports game, first person shooter. It's funny that the drive-and-go-anywhere-in-a-living-city-sandbox type games haven't yet found a name for the genre. The nearest we get is 'GTA clone', which is a bit harsh when most of the games are nothing like Grand Theft Auto, Crackdown being a prime example of this. In Crackdown you're not some jumped-up gangster wannabe, you're the law, and you're out to rid the city of every criminal out there through a zero-tolerance, no holds barred approach. Actually, reading that last bit back I realise that it's not what you're doing that is much different to GTA, but the way you're going to go about doing it. While every other person and gang member in the city has the abilities of a normal person, you have been scientifically augmented to give you some very special abilities. Jumping over buildings? Check. Pick up and toss cars around? Check. Shoot the bollocks off a fly at half a mile? Eaaaasyyy.
So you're dropped into a city, pointed in the direction of the nearest gang and off you go. There are three gangs, and each gang has six generals and a kingpin, take out a general and you soften the kingpin up, take out the kingpin and you take out the gang. There's a little bit of info about each general and kingpin, but there's no story, just an unidentified voice that tells you to go kill the gangs, and chastises you for killing civilians. For those that want a slightly more directed adventure, this game will not be for you, but for those that like to push the boundaries of a game by mucking about, this game is hog heaven.
The real attraction of the game is the way it makes the 'agent' you control a god amongst men. When you start off you're pretty dangerous, but as you play the game your five skills (agility, strength, firearms, driving and explosives) get upgraded so that you become something akin to the Incredible Hulk with a gun. To upgrade your firearms you just have to kill gang members with a gun, to upgrade your explosives you have to kill with explosives, and to upgrade your strength you have to either beat up gang members manually or pick up stuff and throw it at them. There's a lot you can pick up as your strength improves everything from drain pipes through to buses and even dead bodies. Driving is improved by running over gang members or completing road races, while agility is improved by picking up green orbs scattered around the city in hard to get places or completing rooftop foot races. Each skill can be improved by four levels, and improving them is certainly necessary to kill all the gang kingpins.
Agility is the most interesting of the skills, as it gives Crackdown something different over the GTA formula namely that you can scale anything you can see in the game with a high enough skill. While the land area covered is not as great as San Andreas, the fact that you can climb three hundred feet up a building really expands the area you can cover. There's a simple joy in hurling yourself between buildings, continuously looking for hand holds and grabbing onto ledges as you go. As your agent improves his abilities and you improve your control of the agent there are the rooftop races that you can partake in you only race against the clock in single player (as previously mentioned you get an increase in skill if you beat the par time), but if you go online and invite a friend into your game you can race them too.
Which nicely brings me onto the co-op. If larking about on your own wasn't enough, then you can invite a mate into your game to kill the gang bosses with, or (more likely) just mess about. Stack up a load of cars and then detonate a charge underneath them, or simply massacre a load of gang members. My personal favourite is to offer to show a friend how to climb to the highest point in the game, and then, while they're admiring the view, round house kick them off the side...! The game works flawlessly with a friend and Realtime Worlds should be commended for that.
The draw distance in the game is a bit of a marvel too very impressive, although the graphics aren't particularly next generation. Sharp, yes, but the game has a slightly cartoon-like style which mean the textures are a bit plain. There are also some frame rate issues, although they're usually when you have a large explosion, and they don't drag the game down too much because you will generally be thinking about how cool that huge explosion looks (thanks to the game's physics engine) rather than why the game has slowed down. While the game's sounds mostly consist of fairly plain gunfire and engine noises, the way they are altered by your distance from the source of the sound and other environmental conditions brings a depth to them missing from most games. I haven't heard the game in 5.1, but it's pretty damn good on headphones alone.
I think most people will like Crackdown, but those of you that will love it are the ones that don't mind not having a narrative in their game, or indeed much actual game at all. The gang bosses are just like gang members with extra health, and the combat is quite dull shoot people, blow up people, or kick people (there is only one melee move, a sort of jumping roundhouse kick). Not to say that blowing up lots of people in one go isn't fun, it's just that the combat required for a mission doesn't give you too much chance to make use of your unique skills. The lack of content makes the game feel somewhat unfinished in fact, the Xbox 360 Achievements make better use of the game's features than the game's actual goals do.
The lack of any game structure befitting a game from the 21st century would normally cause a game to get absolutely massacred by me. In this paragraph I would normally be writing about how the game is just a novel concept that doesn't stretch beyond the initial 'wow' factor. In my mind though, Crackdown manages to get away with it, perhaps because of the way it has put a spin on an already existing game concept. I suspect that in 7 months time as I run around the GTA4 city I'll be looking up at the rooftops thinking 'my Crackdown agent could've clambered up there'.
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