Crackdown is a third person shooter on the surface, but ends up not being one at all. You're a genetically enhanced "peace" officer that has to run around the city putting end to gang presence and their leaders in the three sections of the city. A different gang rules each section. The city is a giant island fortress in the middle, acting as a base, and three surrounding islands. The point of the game is to overtake enemy strongholds, which then become bases you control, allowing you to change weapons, get ammo, and warp to them. Crackdown is the definition of a sandbox; you can go anywhere, do anything, and just run around the city like a lunatic. It's a blast. You can go anywhere from the start, but you'll be likely to die if you go too far ahead.
Combat, at the start, is shooting people and kicking people. You eventually upgrade, which I'll explain later in detail. The shooting is an auto-aim system, giving it a more arcade feel than making it a legitimate shooter. Frankly, it's not a shooter at all, you're just "mashing" to a degree with guns. Hell, even snipers auto aim for you. Your aiming is basically hitting LT, and it picks a sensible target. You can flick to others with the LS. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it picks a completely random enemy, but for the most part it works. Oh, you have grenades too, which get pretty cool and useful. The variety is there, too. You have a wide range of weapon with statistics, and you upgrade your weapons by finding them in the field and returning them to base. Same with grenades, and there is a great variety there as well. Cluster grenades are just the bomb...literally.
Alright I wanted to save this for later but if I do, I'll have to re cover like every topic. This game employs a skill system that allows you to gain experience and upgrade the specific skill by performing specific acts. The skills are agility, driving, strength, firearms, and explosives. You upgrade strength, firearms and explosives by killing enemies with your body, guns, or bombs, respectively. You upgrade your driving by performing driving missions or doing stunts. You upgrade your agility with by far the most fun and infuriating aspect of the game: collecting agility orbs (I'll cover this more next paragraph). Each stat has five levels, and as you level up, your character improves. Strength allows you to eventually throw trucks at people, while agility allows you to jump higher and run faster. You'll be jumping multiple stories by the end of the game, and it's freakin' awesome and quite a good time. I spent most of my time just running around and climbing buildings, it's freakin' addictive.
Alrighty, so since I did upgrades early, I'll touch on combat and weaponry. As you gain levels in firearms, strength and explosives, you do more damage with the corresponding attack, simple. There are a ton of weapons available, with the end game weapon being the homing rocket launcher. It is so much fun to use lol, you just blow up everything and bedlam ensues. There are snipers, assault rifles, handguns...anything you want is basically there. As you upgrade strength, you get new combat abilities, such as the ability to hurl cars and trucks at your opponents, ground stomps, and other moves. Combat is redundant, but it's fun. And the madness is so overwhelming it's hard to actually notice the monotony.
So your options to get around are driving and running/climbing. Your driving options are either the cars at the agency, which upgrade over time and give you ridiculous abilities, my favorite being the jumping car, or you can steal pedestrian vehicles a la the Grand Theft Auto series. You can also deposit these vehicles at strong holds to store for later use (permanently). There are races, both on foot and in car, that award you points to the respective category that are actually a lot of fun. Driving is fun and a million times faster, but the real joy is on foot. This game made it so you can climb anything with a ledge or something to grab on, allowing you to scale the largest buildings in the game. You can even climb the entire tower in the middle of the island, and it's like a game in itself; took me well over an hour to do the first time. As you increase your agility, you can climb faster since you are faster and can jump higher (this also allows access to new buildings). Once you're up, you can sprint and jump across buildings, shooting terrorists from the air. There is no feeling like it, and games have stolen the concept **cough Prototype cough cough** since Crackdown created it. Every one I know that has played this game has burnt countless hours just running around and climbing crap. Do you know why?
ORBS. Get used to it, bucko, you're going to be eating them for breakfast. Throughout the city are 500 agility orbs and 300 hidden orbs. Agility orbs upgrade your agility, crazy enough, while the hidden ones give a small boost to every stat. And this is why everyone spends half the game climbing buildings and running around, because orbs are 1) obsession causing, 2) fun to get and 3) improve your character. I spent over half the game just climbing buildings looking for orbs, it's literally just fun as hell to do.
Oh wait, I left out an important part. The whole game is co-op, online only, but man does it make it fun. It's also fun to fight eachother, my favorite method being planting a ton of trigger explosives on the spawn point and just blowing them up the second they show up lol. Such a good time.
Story, you say? It sucks; it's stupid, don't worry about it. I'll give you some spoilers, it turns out you're working for the bad guys, and it perfectly sets up the sequel that disappointed me beyond comprehension. But it doesn't matter, just run around and shoot crap.
This game was interesting to me. It was my first experience with a next-gen sandbox, and I loved it. The game can be linear if you want it to be, or you can just do whatever you want to do. In terms of what I look for in games, you can improve your character, collect things, improve your weapons, explore...doesn't seem to have a lot but what it does it does extremely well. The exploration alone is an absolute blast, and couple that with the great collection system...you're gold. I also had a ton of fun doing the various races, and also just driving around trying to do stunts, like barrel rolls. One thing this game also implements fantastically is the achievement system; this game boasts some of the most unique achievements to date, and they make you really play outside of the standard game. There's one for juggling a car with rocket launchers for a set amount of time, or diving off the top of the main center building into a small reservoir. The achievements don't just reward you for playing the main game, they force you to do new things and actually add value to the game, an incentive rarely used by game developers.
If you like running around, shooting everything with no regards towards realism, jumping around like a lunatic bed bug, and running people over in a jumping car, this game is for you. If you don't...what's wrong with you? That all sounds wonderful to me, and is why I adored Crackdown. Just a heads up, the sequel is almost the exact same game...just stick to the original.
Next up, I'm going to try to tackle Symphony of the Night finally. And seriously, if you read this, let me know please. As of now I don't think anyone's actually read a full one.
Crackdown
