Crackdown

I finished Crackdown with Colin today (well, technically yesterday but I'm writing this at 2 or 3AM so I still consider it the same day) and figured it would be a good time to review it.

Crackdown

Overall:

Crackdown is a third person shooter sandbox game on the Xbox 360. It was one of the early 360 games, so even though it's current gen, it's a few years old. You play as a super enhanced cop in a city that is practically controlled by three different gangs that each have their own 1/3 of the city. The police forces of the world have merged into one group known as The Agency and made their last stand on a central island, you're their last hope for taking the city back. You're tasked with finding a bunch of the head honchos in each group and killing them. Six guys that each control one aspect of the gang plus the kingpin. You can technically go for the kingpin first but the more of the little guys you take down, the easier he is (and he's still fairly hard so I recommend taking them down). You can take the three gangs down in any order you want (or even work on all at the same time) though there is definitely a suggested order as the power of the weapons each gang has is significantly different.

Pros:

This game is fun, especially when you first get into it and have a whole world to explore. You have 5 abilities that grow throughout the game (Agility, Driving, Strength, Demolitions, and Accuracy) and your ability to explore is drastically altered and increased as these go up, especially agility which lets you run faster and jump higher. The exploring aspect reminded me of Assassin's Creed mixed with Spider Man 2, you have to grab on to ledges and window sills to get up high, but we're talking about jumping up 4 or so stories of a sky scraper at a time and your forward jump can take you from building to building if you're high enough. The freedom to go to any part of the city right off the bat is nice too. There are a variety of activities to do besides just taking the bosses down, you can do races to increase your driving ability, you can do roof top running races to help agility, you can search for agility orbs hidden high up that increase agility, you can try to drive your car through stunt markers to help driving ability, and a few other little optional things. The super cars the Agency gives you at their HQ are neat and morph depending on your driving ability and you can capture gang cars to use yourself (though there isn't much point as the agency cars are better in every way and there is no disguise mechanic). They do have a bunch of radio stations in the cars and I believe they're different for different sets of vehicles (it just plays music, don't expect GTA radio station stuff). The feeling of jumping around and throwing huge trucks at bad guys and jumping from roof top to roof top while firing rocket launchers at guys is done well and feels fun. The agility orbs and hidden orbs (orbs that give experience to all stats) are nice as they give you an easy way to upgrade your stats and you don't have to get them all to max out your agility (there are 500 agility orbs, I know I'm not gonna hunt them all down). For most of the game you're left with a feeling of always having a bunch of options for things to do which is always nice.

Cons:

This is a rather short game. You can kill most of the smaller bosses in 5 or 10 minutes if you know what you're doing and of the right power level to take them on and the big bosses might take 10 to 15 minutes. Some of the extra side stuff isn't terribly good (Stockpile missions of finding 100 orbs in a given area for a tiny bit of agility are boring and not worth it) or much too difficult. Even with maxed agility of 4 stars I still had problems doing some of the rooftop races that were meant to be done at 2 stars and the driving ones were only slightly easier. The story is sorta thin and just enough to give you people to kill, but they gave little bios and background info on each boss so they did try some, it just wasn't enough to be considered a good story. The stunt mechanic in cars is done sorta sloppily and doing stunts is very difficult except in one or two areas on the map until you've maxed out driving (the hardest stat to max out) and even then it's still somewhat difficult. I can't really recall any of the music from the game except the car stuff and I had to look in the manual on how to lower the volume or turn it off as a lot of it isn't terribly good. By the end you've sorted gotten a little bored of the system: you run in and blow away a bunch of guys making a beeline for the boss while hiding once in a while to get your health back (they do try to mix up the later boss fights with having to go through elaborate areas and stuff but it's sorta the same thing but a little harder). The melee mechanic is sorta weak as usually there is little reason to kick someone rather then shoot them assuming you have anywhere near a decent gun (and little reason to shoot them instead of blow them up unless innocent civilians are around to give you an experience penalty) but they do make it level up faster then shooting or demolitions so you don't have to do it as much to get it maxed out (and it does let you lift bigger stuff so it is useful in that regard).

Overall Rating:8/10

Closing Remarks:

This is a really fun game for the first half (it would get a 9 or so if the whole game was like that) but after you max your stats and get used to how going after the bosses works it gets a little boring. While some of your abilities are a joy to use (Demolitions, Agility, Accuracy) others have little use or are hard to level up (Strength and Driving). Overall this is still a good game with a lot of fun in it, it just needed some different end game stuff to keep it fresh.