Game Review : Crackdown

I finally cracked down and reviewed crackdown. Har Har, check it out after the jump!

In Crackdown you play the role of a super agent thats been created to clean up a city thats befallen to 3 intense gangs.

There is one central island, the Agency which acts as a home base and three surrounding islands that comprise Pacific City into 3 districts. Your job is to kill the Ultimate gang boss, which is dubbed a "Kingpin" but to do so, you need to take out the current gang leaders to weaken the Kingpins defence.

Crackdown is designed as an open ended environment and its up to you to choose who's ass you are going to kick next. There is a wide array of weapons (although I felt there could have been more) and a great assortment of vehicles. You have 3 agency vehicles that will morph ala transformers style as your driving skill is increased. Driving is loads of fun but gets boring quickly as pedestrians will constantly get in your way and you inevitably obliterate them with your car. This ofcourse pisses off the local law enforcement and you will either have to kick more ass against your allies or just go lay low for a few minutes till they cool off and forget about it.

As you progress through your skills you will have more accurate shooting, higher jumping, better strength to lift things etc... The more you use your differen't skills, the more they level up, With the exception of agility, you gotta climb and jump your way to find these orbs that will give you more "agility points" and thus level up your Character to jump higher, move faster etc.. its TONS of fun jumping from building to building in search of these orbs and occasionally you'll find hidden orbs instead of the agility orbs. Hidden orbs will add points to all skills and there are 300 of them in total (500 Agility orbs).

What I really like is that certain skills will reflect not only in your stats but also change your appearance, the changes are subtle as you go through the game but if you download the new patch and install the new expansions you can play "Keys to the City" mode and see just how dramatic the physical changes to your character are if you do them rapidly.

One of Crackdowns greatest strengths is its controls, You can easily lock onto a hostile by pressing down on your left trigger, this is also however one of Crackdowns most annoying faults because after killing a target you can still "accidently" lock back onto a fallen foe. Frustrating if you have several bitches that need to get their slap on. I usually just toss a Grenade (by pressing right bumper) into the mix and watch all that shit blow up.

The framerate is very smooth in crackdown and VERY very occasionally I have noticed slowdown, but when I do its usually because I've piled up a huge amount of cars and have tons of pedestrians around when I decide to blow the entire thing up. Draw distances in this game are amazing, I will fire a rocket from ontop of a skyscraper and literally watch that thing fly over to the next island, impressive to say the least.

I love the graphics in this game, they aren't for everyone as they are very comic style but the contrasts and colours are just brilliant, the textures are rich as well. Lots of particle effects and great physics.

Multiplayer is great on Crackdown as well, but one thing that continually pisses me off is finding a player on Xbox Live to play with! I get more luck loading the demo to play with people rather than my full copy of the game.

Now what is weak about this game? Variety. It's all the same shit, there is almost NO variety in this game, don't buy it for a deep story line, because really all this game is about is ass kicking and cool cars. Sure there are "Agility Races" but they are more annoying than anything, an easy way to up your agility skill. There are also vehicle races but they are not very much fun at all (same reason as I wrote above about driving) However I'm a picky gamer and you may disagree about the extra missions. The real meat here though is ass kicking and everything else is a VERY secondary option.

This is a great game to pick up and play if you feel the need for wickedly huge explosions, insane jumping and tons of ass kicking. You may not want to sit there and play the whole thing through, then again, I did and I had tons of fun doing it, I wasn't wowed by the gameplay, but the graphics really impressed me. I put it in my reccomended pile.