The last safe refuge is being taken over by crime and violence, turning the once peaceful city into a nightmare. The Agency, a secret government organization, has sent you as a secret weapon upon the city to save it from the crime lords and new-age mafia. You’re an Agent of Justice, and you’re pumped full of experimental drugs with the law on your side.
Crackdown pushes the free-roaming action-driving hybrid genre (e.g. Grand Theft Auto, Mafia, The Godfather, Scarface, etc.) into the next generation with the first ever truly 3-D playground. Enforce justice by any means necessary in Pacific City, a crime-ridden urban center primed to explode and ready for you to explore. Enter an interactive world where anything can be used as a weapon as you clean up the streets the only way you know how. Your way.
Developed by Scotland’s Real Time Worlds exclusively for Microsoft Game Studios and the Xbox 360 console, Crackdown is the brainchild of Dave Jones, the creative genius behind Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings.
- True next-gen visuals: Harnessing the amazing power of Xbox 360, Crackdown players enforce justice against the backdrop of a crime-ridden metropolis that is massive in scale and meticulous in detail. The game’s unique presentation employs a highly stylized rendering technique that turns it into a living, breathing graphical novel.
- Double the mayhem: From the initial conception, Crackdown has been built to feature a dynamic and engaging co-op experience for double the action, carnage, and intensity.
- Cooperative Gameplay: Double the Mayhem: From its initial concept, to final design, Real Time Worlds focused on delivering dynamic, engaging cooperative gameplay for double the carnage, action and intensity.
- Free-form gameplay: For the first time ever, every inch of an urban playground has been designed for you to explore and exploit. Use any route necessary as you take down the crime syndicates, going under, around, or through the environment however you choose.
- Music as Environment: Over 100 licensed tracks, spanning a wide range of styles and genres, give audio identities to characters and locations in Crackdown. Coupled with a next-generation use of 5.1 surround sound, gamers will know just from the music and sound effects they hear which crime syndicate is headed their way.
- Over-the-top action: Get the job done, no matter what it takes. Any strategy or tactic is acceptable, so long as you re-claim the streets. Unleash the awesome powers of your agent, developing his full genetic potential, becoming faster and stronger, learning bone-crushing moves, using outrageous weapons, and defying certain death at every turn.
- The Environment is your weapon: Low on ammo? Never a problem. Thanks to an amazing amount of props and a deep physics system, you can use whatever you get your hands on as a weapon: Trash cans, vehicles, even people. Set the scene for mass destruction with a game that remembers your actions better than you do. Gather vehicles to assemble barricades, build epic piles of explosives, push it to the limit. Crackdown can take it.
Crackdown is built upon the free-roaming play principle that has made games like Oblivion, Dead Rising, Grand Theft Auto, and even Super Mario 64 so successful. Players can just go through the missions, or lose themselves completely by roaming around and exploring this vertical urban world. Once you start playing, the game sucks you into addictive behavior. You feel compelled to upgrade your Agent by collecting more orbs, jumping higher, and wielding more powerful weapons. They certainly have the “crack” part of Crackdown right.
Even though the game can look complicated, it’s really very simple and straightforward. Set in a third-person perspective, this action game’s ficticious world is called Pacific City, and is a sandbox-type environment consisting of three islands (is this starting to sound like GTA?). An over-the-top game-show-host type narrator explains the opening story… the world is a horrible place, there’s crime everywhere, blah blah blah. Whatever reason you need to tell me to crack some heads open is fine with me.
One of the interesting aspects of the story to explain your near-superhuman powers is the use of experimental bio-engineering drugs to increase the Agents’ powers. The semi-ethical science also incorporates human cloning, which “explains” why you have infinite lives when you die (which will happen often).
Action is the main focus of Crackdown, which is good, because the storyline couldn’t pop it’s way out of a wet paper sack. Characters are fully interchangable, so not only is there no character storyline, you don’t really become emotionally attached to any one Agent.
You start off in the Agency “bat-cave”, a small island smack-dab in the middle of the other three (how convenient), with no powers, no cars, no women… You can choose between one of three vehicles, a muscle car, an assault-level SUV, and a truck cab. As your character progresses, your vehicles become upgraded, becoming more powerful.
Rival gangs, drug-lords, and other ne’er-do-wells are fighting to rule Pacific City, and you start out with two standard-issue sidearms to help establish order. You can pick up weapons from your fallen enemies, or purchase new ones as you progress through the campaign. The game also provides three levels of difficulty: Tough, Ruthless, and Psychotic (which is insanely difficult and pretty much requires co-op to survive).
Although there are many mini-games unlocked within the campaign, most of the gameplay is in the Campaign and Time-Trial modes. The game is almost exclusively a single-player experience, but online cooperative gaming is possible over Xbox Live or System Link. There is no split-screen play, so each player much have their own copy of the game, and their own console.
Playing co-op with a friend (or even a complete stranger) is a complete blast, and the pun is very intended. Gamers can jump in and out of a game without penalty, or they can stick it out for the long haul and complete the entire game together (which earns a special Achievement). The world is completely open for both players, who can play completely independently. You don’t have to join your teammate on his particular mission… you can goof off doing anything you want. You can collect orbs independently of each other, which means there is no competition for orbs. You can also check the Xbox Live leaderboards for how you fare at the mini-games and time trials.
Leveling up is a big part of Crackdown, having simple role-playing elements. Your Agent improves five core skills: Agility, Strength, Firearms, Explosives, and Driving. Skills are improved by using each one, not by arbitrarily assigning points to them. Once you’re maxed out, you are like the Mighty Thor, but without the funny costume (although Agent uniforms are kinda funky). Agility is necessary for jumping from rooftop to rooftop, which lets you navigate around the city with ease. To upgrade your other abilities, you’ll have to drive in races, use grenades, launch rockets, throw things to gain strength, and shoot everything that moves to gain Firearms skill.
Controlling your character is simple to understand. Your body is aimed and controlled with the left analog stick, and the camera is rotated using the right stick. Agents can walk, run, crouch, swim, shimmy, and from ledges and drive cars. You are not limited to the cars you drive, and can enter any vehicle in the game (a la GTA again). Swimming is interesting, as you can shoot out of the water like a freaky dolphin-human freak thing.
Lock-on shooting is a necessity, since many enemies will appear above (and below) you, and hide behind corners. Press the left trigger to lock onto a target and squeeze the right trigger to shoot. You can even spin in the air and target multiple enemies in mid-leap. Free-form shooting can be difficult, because it’s very easy to become disoriented, go too far, or just find yourself in the wrong direction. Unfortunately, once you’ve killed an enemy, the auto-aim stays locked onto the corpse.
Driving in Crackdown isn’t as fun as other games in this genre. The driving mechanics suffer from a design standpoint. Although you can drive any car in the game, you’ll avoid civilian cars, because they apparently have tires made of tar. Even your Agent vehicles are slow, turn poorly, and generally don’t accelerate very well.
The vertical is explored at great length in this game. You really can’t navigate alot of the buildings at the beginning, because your Agility hasn’t progressed enough to allow jumping that high. Because of this, you will be hunting down green Agility Orbs like Cortney Love in a maze full of heroin. The more you collect, the higher your Agent jumps, the more Orbs you see, the more you rack your brain figuring out how to get to them… it’s a downward spiral.
There are even super-secret Blue Orbs and three kinds of Green Orbs (with Single, Double, Triple, and even Quadruple-strength agility power-ups), 500 green orbs in total. The more powerful ones are found in higher places. The blue orbs don’t do all that much, but unlock an Achievement once you’ve collected all 300 of them. You don’t have to collect one single Orb to progress through the game; they’re just one of the addictive elements that keep your hands glued to the controller.
The main story can be completed in a relatively quick six to eight hours. After that, there’s not much to do except to unlock all the Achievements, which means alot of rooftop hoofing, racing, and over-the-top stunts. The only place you can go at first is the Los Muertos’ district (serves as the “tutorial” level, conveniently having shorter buildings to accommodate your stubby legs). You get a little taste of the world so you don’t become overwhelmed, then as you complete a bit of the story, it all opens up, and you can go anywhere you want.
The game is also well-designed in another aspect. Once you get close to a boss, a game tracker identifies him (or her). If you read the dossier on the Boss, you’ll find how they fit into the crime organization. If you defeat critical sub-bosses first, then the Big Boss is weakened, giving you a distinct advantage. If you strategically take out the right mini-bosses, then bigger bosses won’t have an army of rocket-launching maniacs. Bosses are only as tough as their henchmen, so you weaken the henchmen, and the boss is only as tough as his health bar.
The visuals in Crackdown mimic a “comic-book” effect, outlining characters with thick black lines, using some cell-shading techniques. The textures are dense and complex, so it looks less like the Sunday Funnies, and more like a limited-edition autographed graphic novel with satin-gloss pages. In the past, cell-shaded games looked too simplistic, which wouldn’t showcase the Xbox 360’s graphical horsepower.
The explosions are what really stands out in Crackdown. The physics and particles have realistic trajectory, and react and collide with other objects, so you’ll never see the same explosion twice. The draw distance is incredible; much longer than other games in the genre. The special effects are great, too, as Crackdown has more of a “sci-fi” setting than many other free-roaming titles. Games like Gears of War and Rainbow Six: Vegas have come out and have set the graphical standard that all other Xbox 360 games are judged. Sorry, Crackdown… for all your prowess, you’re still not as pretty as the Prom Queen.
Although Crackdown doesn’t last that long, the story is weak, and the AI is predictable, there are just some things that are exhilarating. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop like Neo in “The Matrix” is awesome, and tracking down the “wub-wub” of the orbs can replace any chemical addiction you may have. You can extend the fun a little bit by playing co-op with a friend. Many gamers like to waste time and lose themselves in a virtual world, and this one is a rush while it lasts.
You can’t just make me an addict and take it away so quickly! I need my fix!
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