Crackdown
Score: 97% ESRB: Mature Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios Developer: Realtime Worlds Media: DVD/1 Players: 1, 2 (Co-op) Genre: Third Person Shooter/ Action
Graphics & Sound: Crackdown is one of those games that really shows what next-gen means. Not only is it a visually pleasing game, but little details like how it handles levels of detail and model pop in just helps to make the game easier on the eyes. Pacific City is a sprawling metropolis spanning eight or so main islands. You can go from one side of the city to the other without seeing a single load screen (well, okay there is the first one when you start the game) and the way the distant buildings and landmarks start off looking like blank blocks whose details slowly fill in as you get closer just helps to give you the feeling of the large world you are trying to explore and clean up. The game's audio aspects weren't as impressive as its visual, but for the most part it wasn't bad. Gun fire, engines and background music seemed to be right on, but the most prominent audio, the narrator, quickly became one of the more aggravating parts of the game. The narrator is, for the most part, the only voice you will hear in the game. Sure various enemies will shout obscenities at you, but he is easily the most noticeable. Unfortunately, once you have gone through about a third of the game, he doesn't really say anything new. You will hear him tell you what the various race types are, give you tips, let you know when key gang members are close and various other tidbits of information. These informative sound-clips were pretty good and dead on. I rarely had issues with them. Where I had problems were all the times the voice would say "Finest view in the city" or "That's an impressive ascent agent." This last one was particularly annoying not just because of its over-use, but because about 70% of the times it was said, I was on the ground or maybe one floor up. It just got really annoying really fast.
Gameplay: The basis of Crackdown is fairly simple and not necessarily original. You are a lone agent, genetically enhanced and charged with cleaning up the streets of Pacific City. There are three gangs in control of the place, Los Muertos, The Volk and Shai-Gen. In order to rid the city of each gang, you must cut off its head. Unfortunately, getting to the head is the hardest part. Each gang-boss has several generals underneath them that control different aspects of the gang. There might be one criminal in charge of importing weapons, while another one is a recruiter and another maintains the vehicles. The idea is to take out each of these lower level criminals to weaken the framework that holds the major gangster up. With enough of his support taken out, it should be a lot easier to cut off the head. I wasn't really sure how much this system actually hindered the major bosses until I was on the third gang and foolishly tried to take out the leader first. Without removing any of the lower level generals, I barely made it a couple of floors up the skyscraper he was hiding in. The other aspect of Crackdown that makes it stand out is the skill leveling feature. Your character has five skills: agility, driving, explosives, strength and weapons. You increase these skills by killing gang members using that skill (with the exception of agility - you collect orbs on rooftops to up that skill). If, on the other hand, you kill a civilian instead of a bad guy, you will lose skill points. There are four stars for each skill and each star will give you everything from a larger blast radius to more accurate shots or more control of vehicles. Besides the single-player Campaign mode, Crackdown also offers two-player Co-Op over Xbox Live where you and a friend can try and clean up the city together.
Difficulty: Crackdown's difficulty is an interesting topic. Though the game is an open-world shooter, it also has enough RPG elements to make the game as easy or as hard as your willingness to grind away at repetitive tasks in order to increase your skills. When approaching a general or gang leader, your chance of taking down the key criminal gets calculated and displayed to you. If you are walking up to the gang's leader and you haven't taken out his support (guns, recruits, etc.), then your chance of taking him out is really slim. If you are going after one of the lower level enemies and your skills aren't developed enough to get to him or her, then your chance at actually achieving your hit is lower. All that being said, I found that there were very few times I had to spend purposefully leveling up in order to prepare for a key criminal assault. I found that when I was getting ready to face an opponent that was too tough for me, there was typically one a little lower on the food chain that I could take out and consequently, raise my various skills just enough to make another boss battle favorable.
Game Mechanics: One of the only aspects of Crackdown that could use any kind of improvement is the aiming system. You have a target reticule on your HUD and where it is will be where your attacks are directed. If you want to lock onto a character, you hold down the Left Trigger. The sights will then focus on the part of the object that you are targeting. The smaller the reticule, the more accurate the shot and the smaller the target, the longer it takes to shrink. This all works fine, and because of this system, you can target a person's head, arms, legs or a vehicle's tire or gas tank. What the problem is though is the game's inability to lock onto exactly what I am trying to target. The most frequent case is when I am facing a group of gangsters and I mow one down. When I release my lock and try to lock onto the guy next to him, I relock on the now dead enemy. Other related issues is the locking system targeting a car instead of the thug that just got out of it, or not focusing on the explosive propane tanks next to the gangsters. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of ways to get around this issue. It seems like open-world titles like this one always seems to suffer from this or similar problems. This flaw doesn't make Crackdown unplayable by any means. I still found myself putting untold number of hours into the game and I found myself running a little late in the mornings on more than one occasion because I thought I could put "just a few minutes" into it before rushing off (of course, these few minutes would always last much longer than expected). When it comes down to it, Crackdown is a fun experience that pretty much any 360 owner should add to their collection.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
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