Review: Crackdown (360)

The value and worth of New Games Journalism still gets debated three years after the term was initially coined. For the uninitiated, New Games Journalism is a way of writing gaming articles with references to other mediums, creative analyses, and quite prominently, personal anecdotes about how the journalist has played the game. Crackdown seems perfectly suited to this form of video games journalism, as it's all about how you, the player, will explore and experience the massive metropolis of Pacific City in your one-man war on crime. Quite simply, Crackdown is a game you need to experience yourself to fully understand and enjoy. And enjoy it you will, oh yes.

At its core, Crackdown is a sandbox game. You're dropped into Pacific City, fully rendered in its comic-book styled cel-shaded glory, with basic abilities and knowledge, and then suddenly thrust into a massive fire fight with one of the game's three criminal organisations. Your mission is simple: destroy the three gangs and bring peace to the city. How you do this, however, is for you to decide. Yet Gamestyle is betting you'll decide to do this in the most violent, extreme, and destructive way possible.

That's actually pretty much all there is to Crackdown; there are no GTA-esque side missions aside from the two types of races, and all the main missions boil down to searching the city for the lead criminals of each gang and destroying them. However, you'll be too busy leaping over rooftops, hurling buses at missile trucks and blowing things up to notice. This is because the agent you control is genetically enhanced to allow his abilities to grow over time. To put it simply, the more you employ a certain skill, the better you become at it. There are five core skill sets in the game: agility, strength, driving, firearms, and explosives. The latter four are increased by killing criminals through their use, so killing criminal with a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick increases your strength. Do it enough and eventually you'll be chucking buses at the gang members. Driving ability (little more than better control) can also be increased by completing races and performing stunts, but again the bulk is done through random violence against criminals. To increase your agility, however, you must collect the agility orbs scattered around Pacific City's three islands, though thankfully you don't need all five hundred to get up to maximum agility (even though you will try to get them all anyway).

The agility skill is one of Crackdown's most enjoyable, and turns the game into a kind of free-roaming platformer. As you leap 30 feet into the air over the city rooftops searching the area for that one elusive agility orb, it's arguably more addictive than collecting every Shine in Mario Sunshine. And when you start combining abilities with your agility, the fun really begins (leaping down from a 100 feet tall building with a missile truck in your hands aimed at a lone gang member's head for example).

Exploitation of your agent's abilities is definitely what makes Crackdown stand out from the crowd of sandbox games, especially since there is little else to it. There are a dozen car races and fourteen rooftop races (agility-based sprints and jumps) but little else. All the missions boil down to killing gang members, which is still quite a challenge because the game hurls enemies at you in their hundreds on occasion. The game is challenging and there is quite a lot to explore and collect, but the main quest (including diversions for creating huge explosions, car jumps, and orb hunting) can be completed within a six to ten hour period. You can still combat crime with your upgraded agent after completing the main quest, but it's only sporadic gang fighting. You cannot restart the main game with your fully-kitted-out agent, but you can fight the bosses again in the time trial mode.

The game's co-operative mode adds much enjoyment. Launching pincher attacks or double-barrelled full on assaults is incredible amounts of fun, as you and your partner cut a bloody path through the enemies. The enjoyment from exploration and general playing around in the game is also doubled when played with a friend. Gamestyle recalls one such incident when, in the middle of a mission, a bus was thrown at our partner, which resulted in a high-speed rooftop chase and many bullets and rockets being fired by both sides, resulting in high civilian casualties and much comedy.

Crackdown is a brilliant starting point to a game; it's a pity that the enjoyment doesn't last too long. The missions, openness and powers are all superb fun, but once the last orb has been collected and the final criminal blown to smithereens, there's little to go back to. Hopefully the forthcoming downloadable content will address the issues stated in this review; but while it lasts, Crackdown is one of the most enjoyable Xbox 360 games available.

Rating: 8 / 10

Words by Garry Webber