Crackdown (Xbox 360) Review

Leaping in the air, locking on to a target, and blasting it is incredibly fluid and becomes second nature in no time. Once locked on to a target you can select which area of the target to aim for with the right joystick, and the longer you stay locked on, the more accurate your shots are. You can shoot a persons legs or arms to disable them, or go for the lethal head shot, and when you're aiming at cars you can easily switch your aim to the tyres - it's highly controllable, and a breath of fresh air given some of the horrible implementations of lock-on aiming we've seen in past genre-mates. Indeed, the entire system is so near perfect, we're surprised the main fault wasn't glaringly obvious to designers/testers - in that it's way too easy to lock on to your allies, and even corpses. This would be excusable if you could switch aim with a button press, and friendly fire didn't hurt your allies, but the way things are it's just plain frustrating. Nothing hurts a game more than the feeling of fighting with a camera system or control mechanism, even if it only crops up occasionally.

The driving aspect of the game is great. When you're going flat out in a fast car there is a fantastic sense of speed, and the only cars in the game that handle like shopping trolleys are the ones you'd expect to in real life. You can acquire a car by pulling the passenger out, Grand Theft Auto style, or you can drop in to your headquarters to pick up an Agency super car, SUV or truck - these three vehicles being the most fun to drive, apart from the muscle cars that are easily jacked from the Los Muertos gang. I'm stunned that motorbikes weren't added - they were one of the best enhancements to the Grand Theft Auto series over all its incarnations, and their absence here is disappointing - especially when you think of what the Agency motorbike would have been like.

Unfortunately yet another near perfect game mechanic is tainted, this time by an unusual suspect - the pedestrians. They're absolutely moronic, and won't get out of the way of a police car with sirens blaring - indeed, they'll jump off the footpath onto the road directly into the way a lot of the time. This wouldn't be an issue if you weren't punished for hitting them, but you are, and as a result, driving was the only skill that felt like a chore to me to advance - a real shame. It would've been far better had they stuck with the classic video game "super-pedestrian" - invincible long-jumpers that never fail to leap out of your way.

One major gripe with the gameplay is the horrible AI. Given the massive advancement in graphics over the past ten years, I'm really disappointed that we haven't seen similar leaps in AI. If you're going to make friendly fire damage your allies, either give the player a command that tells them to get out of the way, or give the non-playable characters AI that's smart enough to realise the player is a level four in explosives, isn't holding any weapons that aren't explosive, and that it would be a good idea to give him the room to blast the enemy without taking out everyone else. Given these NPCs are supposed to be agents just like the player, it's odd that they don't keep up with your abilities enough to lend a hand - you won't see them leaping from rooftop to rooftop, or picking up a semi-trailer and throwing it at an enemy 100 meters away, and too often there's been five or six enemies firing at me from an adjacent rooftop, with a squad of five or six agents ten metres away from me, happily watching me get blasted.

Graphics

As a whole, the package is beautifully presented. The art style is cel-shaded, which is a brave option to take amongst the current climate of graphical powerhouses like Gears of War and Lost Planet, but it's executed well, and meshes with the super hero theme. While it's definitely pretty, the level of detail is not quite there when compared to the aforementioned, but allowances have to be made for a pumping frame rate that rarely skips, and a really impressive draw distance that makes things feel more like a sand-city than a sandbox. The cutscenes, which appear as intelligence updates regarding the henchmen you're up against, are particularly well done - superbly animated, and entertaining enough that I never felt the need to skip them.

What really lets down the presentation is the in-game HUD. It's functional enough, it's just that it looks like crap, particularly the tacometer that appears once you jump into a car. I can't figure out why vital information like health and armour is hidden away in the top left hand corner of the screen, while your less important skill statistics are given more real estate in a more prominent position. What I can figure out, is that when my major complaint with the presentation consists of something so trivial, they've done a pretty damn good job with it.

Audio

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