Crackdown (Xbox 360) Review

- If you haven't heard about this game yet, you must be living under a virtual rock. We covered the release of the demo last month, but to sum things up, you're a cop with constantly evolving superhuman abilities, cleaning up crime in a city overrun by it. Today sees the game released on shelves worldwide, and our Games Editor has had a few days head-start to determine whether the cool premise was backed up by an equally cool game. Here's the scoop.

Story

You're a new recruit to the Agency - the law enforcement agency struggling to keep Pacific City under control. Pacific City is made up of several small islands comprising three large districts, each run by a different large-scale organised crime group, affecting the city with their own distinct flavour of nastiness. The opening words of the narrative sums it up perfectly - "It's all gone to shit." Your mission is to clean up the city, one crime boss at a time. Thankfully, the Agency has some nifty technology at its disposal - the most important being the augmentations your character receives, enabling superhuman abilities that evolve as you progress through the game.

Gameplay

The three areas of the city are run by three rival groups - the thugs of Los Muertos, the mobsters of The Volk, and the brainwashed inductees of the Shai-Gen conglomerate. Before taking on whoever is at the reigns of the operation, you'll need to start small, defeating their henchman one at a time, which affects the group in different ways. Take out the defense expert of the Shai-Gen, and the enemies defending the leaders fortress will be less capable of doing so. Each time you take out a henchman, the Agency recalculates the odds of you winning a battle with the leader.

How does it play? Like every game ever based on the Matrix, or Marvel IP should have. Just starting out, you can jump around 10 feet - and jumping around in a video game hasn't been this fun since Super Mario Bros. When you're airborne, you get this fantastic sensation of brief weightlessness before dropping into free fall. Hit the ground from high enough and you'll cause cracks in the pavement along with a mighty thud. Bad ass. Everything pumps along at an intense speed - even before you've built your characters stamina, and especially so once you have. Capcom take note, Lost Planet would've been infinitely more enjoyable had the protagonist been able to run this fast.

Take over supply points scattered over the city, and then once you die (and you will, countless times) you can "regenerate" at any one of the supply points, thanks to the Agencies' advanced cloning techniques. It's always nice when a game's plot smoothes over the holes in those oh-so-unrealistic game conventions (Lost Planet did this with it's arctic setting, using thermal energy and giving the tired "medipack" convention a rest). Take any weapons you find back to a supply depot and you can then grab one from a supply depot at any time, with full ammo.

What really makes the game shine is just how free you are to do what you want. Your contact at the agency will let you know when you're out of your depth, but you're free to cruise around the entire city at will the moment you step into the game - it's really fun to do this, and remains fun to re-explore each time you increase the maximum height of your jump. You're also free to tackle the missions however you'd like - charge in the front door with guns blazing, or take the time to scope out the surroundings and find a more stealthy approach. You can decide to specialise in whatever skill you'd like early on, or just play and let it all happen...and there's no lousy gym mini-games a la Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas so you'll not be reduced to mere button-tapping once.

Your character has five core abilities that can be advanced: Agility, Strength, Explosives, Firearms and Driving. Once you've maxed them out, you'll be able to perform a number of incredibly neat tricks - scaling massive buildings in a couple of effortless hops, picking up a bus and throwing it at an enemy 150 feet away, and taking enemies out for good with one swift roundhouse to the head. Agility is built by finding the 500 Agility orbs scattered throughout the map, Strength is built by taking out opponents with projectiles or your fists, Driving is built by taking out opponents with a vehicle, or completing races, and the remainder should be self-explanatory. There's also 300 Hidden orbs that give all your stats a boost. I'm perfectly aware this is all old news as far as game mechanics go, but where Crackdown has succeeded is that in a vast majority of circumstances, it doesn't feel like a chore to build your stats - which is handy, as you'll want to be maxed out by the time you even think about taking on the final boss.

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