Crackdown has overcome initial skepticism to become a Grand Theft Auto clone that has everything a comic book lover could want - cel-shaded graphics, superpowers, and very little ‘fluff’ to get in the way of the core gameplay (no ridiculous ambulance minigame required to get 100% completion here).
When Crackdown was released, very little attention was paid to it as a game. Aside from the fact that it was another GTA clone on a console which already had Saints Row and Just Cause, it was the delivery vehicle for the far more anticipated Halo 3 beta. Thousands of fanboys dutifully went out and paid £40 for a game they had no intention of playing just for the ‘privilege’ of acting as unpaid beta testers for Microsoft.
This in mind, prior to release many people were expecting Crackdown to be a real lemon. The logic being that the fanboys would buy any game that the Halo 3 beta was bundle with, and that Microsoft would exploit this in order to shift copies of an underwhelming game.
These predictions (among whose supporters I, initially, counted myself) turned out to be wide of the mark. Crackdown is the best of the Xbox 360’s three GTA clones. It might have the tiresome corporate hiphop ‘music’ of Saints Row, and the morally dubious CIA-ordered missions of Just Cause, but these are two entries on a shorter-than-expected list of flaws. Perhaps we shouldn’t be quite so surprised - Realtime Worlds are based in Dundee and headed by David Jones, the former DMA Design man who was involved in the creation of GTA itself (when DMA had become Rockstar North).
Given that I’ve continually referred to Crackdown as a GTA clone, I’ll give a one-sentence comparison for those who are already bored and thinking of hitting PageDown to get straight to the scores. Think GTA 2 with superpowers, a somewhat tacked-on stats system and punishment for killing (non-gang) civilians.
That last part may have you confused. Rmember that Crackdown may share its basic concept with its distant cousin, but this is by no means a GTA game. In this game, you work for a government agency, and casually murdering civilians who get in your way is not allowed (hey, I never said it was a complete replica of the CIA!). Aside from reducing your opportunities for ’sandbox violence’ (a euphemism for ’shoot/explode/burn/kick the crap out of whoever you like’), this also affects you fight against the people you are supposed to kill. Sure, you could use a Firefly rocket (more on those later) against that mob of goons shooting at you from behind their car, but the nearby crowds would also bite it from the resulting explosion (or, more commonly, chain-explosion :P). This could potentially wipe out a couple of minutes’ worth of progress, the main element of the ‘punishment’ I was talking about. The other is that you kill enough of the lemmings that pass as ordinary citizens in Pacific City (hmm… car driving across square… ME RUN IN FRONT!) the police will come after you. I haven’t had this happen to me, and given the quality of the weapons the police use in the game I don’t imagine it being terribly intimidating if it did.
Pacific City has three racially-stereotyped gangs: the Hispanic Los Muertos, the Eastern European Volk (who, despite the name, are more Russian-Polish than German), and the South-East Asian Shai Gen. While some (such as PTD Magazine) see the ‘kill immigrants’ theme of the game as profoundly racis, I prefer to look at the bigger picture. Considering the mockery of the CIA that also persists in the game, it seems likely that this is a commentary on the undercurrent of racism in American law enforcement.
What sets Crackdown apart from its contemporaries is its stats-linked superpowers. When you begin playing your character’s abilities are on par with, if not slightly below, what one would typically find in a game of this type. You can jump to a distinctly average height, aiming at distant targets takes as long as you expect it might, and on the whole your killing power isn’t really that much better than those whose lives you are tasked with taking. By levelling up your skills, you will eventually be able to leap across major roads from rooftop to rooftop, achieve lock-on against distant enemies in seconds, and generally do things that wouldn’t be out of place in a comic book.
The downside is of course that the developers needed to balance the opposition against your uber-man. This is where Crackdown falls short somewhat. The game’s only answer to your character’s immense ability is to throw ludicrous numbers of enemies at you. By the later bosses you can literally have hundreds in a single large room. Such odds mean that often your only option is to bypass these fights and make a mad dash straight for the boss. A game which makes its scripted show-pieces a chore to endure, rather than a challenge to enjoy, is a failure (even if in a small way). The bosses themselves are similarly unimaginative. Rather than give them similar powers to your own, and have epic Matrix-style confrontations, Realtime Worlds give them the same slightly-dopey AI, a massive health bar, and a slightly better gun (which isn’t as good as yours). Truly great action RPGs are fun because of their boss battles, Crackdown succeeds despite them.
The real enjoyment of Crackdown is to be found in the random fights you can pick with patrolling gang members. Unfortunately killing a gan’s leader robs you of that fun in respect of their territory until the end of the game (see what I mean about the boss battles dragging it down?). What begins as kicking a street thug who annoys you can quickly degenerate into a furious fight with gang hit squads. Unlike the boss battles though, these rarely feel unfair. If you die, or more frequently narrowly escape death by leaping into the sea, then it was probably because you got caught in your own rocket’s blast radius, or picked a garbage location for your stand (hint: four-way junctions bad, medium-height buildings with no stairs good).
Much like Just Cause, Crackdown’s story is unimaginative. Unlike its competitor, however, Crackdown’s core gameplay has few flaws. The one that I feel I need to point out specifically is the weapon balancing. By the time you get to the latter stages of the second island, there is simply no viable weapon loadout other than the Harlington machine gun and the Firefly homing missile. Well, you might get away with the unguided Hothead rocket, but since the game inexplicably gives you fewer of those than of Fireflies, the choice is an illusion.
Another peripheral flaw I want to point out is the sound. Crackdown will cause my speakers to make annoying popping noises from time to time. The same speakers have no trouble with the high-explosive Call of Duty 3 or numerous other 360 and PC game, so logic suggests that Crackdown is to blame. That’s what made the sound score so abysmal - well, that and the overuse of corporate hiphop ‘music’ and the confused announcer.
The storyline and its missions may be short and uninspiring, but Crackdown is still great fun.
Scores
Gameplay:
Graphics:
Sound:
Lifespan:
Opinion:
Final Score: 7.6/10
Tags: Crackdown, Games, Just Cause, Realtime Worlds, Reviews, Saints Row, Xbox 360