Retro Review: Crackdown

A few months ago I talked about a tech demo that was released showing the new physics engine for the upcoming sequel to Crackdown. I had never played the first game. Its big push was when the game was sold new players got free entry into the Halo 3 demo. This was slammed on by various people in the gaming community until they played the game and they liked it. Since I had a lapse between when I got Mass Effect 2 and I really didn’t have anything worth playing, I picked up a used copy online and decided to give it a go.

Crackdown is the story of a city completely over run by gangs. There are 3 major areas within the city prime, and your job is to take out the crime lords. You can’t do this directly, instead you have to find and take out the lieutenants, but not necessarily. The way it works is that each lieutenant has something special about them. They are good with tech, make gang members better with guns, or something like that. If you take out the lieutenants, they the gang lord is not as tough. You have to take out all the LT’s in order to trigger the final gang lord, so it’s really a matter of choice in which order you weaken the gang. Still, you can go into any section you want, but without upgraded skills or systems, going into an area that is above your level will get you killed pretty quick, not that the game isn’t going to kill you pretty quick regardless.

Skills are broken down into 5 main sections: Agility, Strength, Guns, Explosives, and Driving. Agility is upgraded by finding and collecting orbs located on top of buildings around the city. The rest by simply using performing actions associated with those skills. So far only driving has been useless, but more on that later. Most of the weapons you have in the game come from fallen enemies, which can be a bit of a problem. The game doesn’t differentiate which weapons you have and which you still need. Plus, since you only can keep weapons you take to a supply point, it’s easy to miss weapons. While not a complete game-breaker, it is annoying.

The game physics are interesting, but can cause some problems. Since you are essentially super human, the more agile you are the higher you can jump. Getting to the top of a building can be annoying, since the only way up is to jump to ledges and then jump up. This begins everyone’s favorite graphics game “Can I grab that?” Plus there is a bad habit of pushing away from a building when you jump up, which causes you to fall and lose all the progress trying to get where you want to go. After a couple of level-up’s you are jumping from rooftop to rooftop covering 50 feet. That is cool, but the sickening “THUD” when you land, along with the loss of your shields and half your health makes jumping into combat tough. Especially since you can only do shooting combat while you are in the air. No flying kicks, no landing ground stomp attacks, nothing. Speaking of which, the melee has some problems as well. If you get too close to a wall from elevation and try to shoot the enemy, you tend to gun-butt the wall a lot. The only way to level up your strength is through melee, so running up to a group of enemies to up your strength can get you killed.



Driving is a joke, but thankfully you don’t have to do it. The game physics, while cool for blowing a body up and keeping it in the air with a succession of rocket fire is cool, plowing through a crowd because cars can’t take a corner at 30 MPH without losing all traction is completely lame. But nothing in the game requires you to drive outside of car race challenges, so it’s the biggest of deals. Shooting tends to be a bit wonky. The auto-target works well, and you can target body parts, but I am not sure why you would want to since you don’t capture anyone.

Ultimately the question must be asked, is this a good game? It’s not bad, but it could be better. This isn’t a game where you marathon through several levels and enjoy a good end boss. This is more a “man my day sucked” and you just grab the rocket launcher and blow the crap out of everything for half an hour or so.