I’ll be the first to admit that I never really gave the first Crackdown game a chance when I got it for my XBox 360. So why have I found it so damn hard to put down its sequel, conveniently enough called Crackdown 2?
The place is Pacific City; the time is the not too distant future; the mission…it’s pretty much to kill all the bad guys. Sound like fun?
It is. It also, less be fair, sounds like a pretty generic game. In many ways, Crackdown 2 is just that. But this is no bad thing.
Players are put in control of a number of Agents (they work for the Agency. Seriously, who would’ve thought that “agents” would work for an “agency”?), genetically modified and bred peacekeepers of Pacific City. Like all potential baby-Robocops, the Agents are enhanced and designed for maximum combat efficiency, with skills in hand-to-hand combat, agility, explosives, firearms and driving. The Agents’ mission is to clear Pacific City of the anarchist cell resisting Agency control (imaginatively known as Cell) while also combating nocturnal freaks, unleashed by a dangerous virus. These dudes…just in case you hadn’t figured it out yet, they’re called Freaks. I say Agents because the game straddles an interesting position between single and multiplayer, and also treats individual Agents as disposable: at any stage, you can jump to another spawning point (effectively a quick-travel point) that has the effect of terminating your current Agent and allowing you to reload with new equipment (while maintaining your levels and stats.) Also, at any stage, a player can jump into another player’s City and help them to fight the Cell and Freaks.
It’s ironic that some of the best things to say about Crackdown 2 come across as the meanest: under normal circumstances, I’d be loathe to give a glowing review to a game with such a flimsy story, but the story is in there somewhere (mostly in the form of audio logs that Agents can find throughout the city.) It just…doesn’t really involve the players, or their characters.
Gameplay takes the form of a sandbox open-world game, with the each of the Agent’s abilities being used to explore the city: part-Grand Theft Auto with liberal sprinklings of the Spider-Man movie games (and Web Of Shadows), players level up simply by doing things (except for attaining the heights of agility, which involves collecting orbs that are dotted around the city, most of them on the rooftops.) The Agents’ agility helps them to jump, climb buildings and contributes to speed; melee attacks increase strength and unlock more powerful punches that are capable of exploding enemies with one punch; using weapons unlocks more powerful weapons to shoot at bigger guys; eliminating enemies by driving over/through them unlocks faster (and more balanced) cars; and blowing up enemies unlocks stronger grenades and mines (some of which can be remotely triggered, others which have a ludicrously high blast radius.)
While this might sound like it makes for some varied gameplay, the truth is a little less satisfactory: the lack of a real storyline means that most of the missions in Crackdown 2 come off more like side-missions, and even they are limited: there are rooftop races to test (and boost) agility; driving races (to do the same for driving abilities); and Freak emergence points. Even Cell strongholds are more or less “optional,” and consist of clearing an area of Cell members, then summoning air support to turn the area into a new spawning point. The main missions involve Project Starburst, a plan to rid Pacific City of the Freaks, which involves activating beacons dotted around the city and then utilising the harnessed sunlight to destroy Freak lairs. Each beacon has three power sources which need to be activated before the beacon itself can be activated. Save for some slightly different locations and enemies, most of these missions are similar enough to each other to be of little note.
It makes for somewhat repetitive gameplay, and proves to be one of Crackdown 2‘s biggest failings: Pacific City is a truly open world, and most missions can be done at any stage or level, although some require a certain level of agility be attained to make them reachable. As such, there’s no real learning curve to the actions or controls within the game, save for some increasingly more difficult enemies in both size and attack: however, while the small fish are fun to try, their larger brethren prove more frustrating than anything else, especially when stranded in a corner in the line of fire of more than one rocket-wielding Cell member.
There are a few too many of these instances for my liking, and the gameplay really doesn’t allow for recovery in these situations. In fact, it brings up one of the game’s other major weaknesses in the camera controls and the AI, which both go hand-in-hand in some bits in making the game unplayable. Agents will rarely get caught in walls, but the camera might; it’s also likely that you’ll end up with enemies shooting rockets at you from behind a corner (and I don’t just mean leaning around the corner to shoot…we’re talking full-on phasing-through-architecture here.) There are a few points where enemy-spawning is also an issue: for every case where you’ll be overwhelmed by enemies, there’ll be another (potentially at the same location) where the AI won’t spawn more enemies until you defeat that teeny tiny guy over on the rooftop way up there. But that other guy who is actually much closer and can be killed by taking a mere two steps to the left is actually outside of the area that the game wants you in, and the AI will allow Cell to recapture the area by the time to take that second step.
But, you see…after all that, I can’t complain too much. Crackdown 2 is still ridiculously fun to play, and bounding from one rooftop to the next, squishing bad guys is far more fun than it should be. Most (yes, I repeat, it’s only a most) of the game’s physics are fun to bash around with. And speaking of “fun” and “bash,” I’d suggest hopping into the Agency buggy and running through hordes of Freaks, because the satisfying sploosh of them exploding all over the place is worth it alone.
On the downside, Crackdown 2 might offer fun, but it’s scarce on variety, and probably won’t have me going back for a replay any time soon. That said, having gone back to the similarly-themed Spider-Man 2 a few times, don’t hold it against me when I’m too busy playing Crackdown 2 to give you guys an early review of the next game.
Zombie Rating: B-
Crackdown 2 is available now, exclusive to Microsoft XBox 360.
Good publish! I totally consent.