System: X360
Dev: Realtime Worlds
Pub: Microsoft
Released: Feb. 20, 2007
Players: 1 - 2
ESRB Rating: Mature
Review by D'Marcus Beatty

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Review Rating Legend
1.0 - 1.9 = Avoid
2.0 - 2.4 = Poor
2.5 - 2.9 = Average
3.0 - 3.4 = Fair
3.5 - 3.9 = Good
4.0 - 4.4 = Great
4.5 - 4.9 = Must Buy
5.0 = The Best

The audio, sadly, is largely forgettable, with tons of songs that you probably won't want to listen to. The voice acting is decent, with very little pedestrian chatter, but pretty good gang cries as they rally to take the protagonist down. Their maniacal laughs and curses really make the player feel as if a group of evil criminals is hunting them down.

Crackdown controls well, with an on-screen reticule for shooting enemies. There is a lock-on feature that allows you to lock on to the foe nearest the reticule, and by using the left analog stick while locked onto an enemy or a vehicle, you can target limbs, tires, or the gas tank. The reticule system works well, although it will occasionally target defeated foes in the midst of a heavy firefight.

Crackdown also has a co-op mode that allows a person to jump into the action and fight alongside one another as dual agents. The players can team up and attack the gangs together or split up and tackle the gangs separately. This can be fun when played with a friend that is near the same power level, but lopsided matches can occur, where one player is vastly stronger than the other, making one player more of a liability in battle.

When the dust settles, Crackdown winds up being a fun and mindless action game. The story is neglible, and there is little to the game besides blowing up bad guys, and leaping across rooftops. However, while the game lasts, these things are undeniably fun to do. If you like a lot of explosions and no exposition, Crackdown might be the game for you.

By D'Marcus Beatty
CCC Co-Site Director

Features:

We track down Crackdown already in progress.
by Patrick Evans

July 18, 2006 - What would it feel like to be a super-hero type law enforcement agent, capable of tossing a full sized truck at an enemy while jumping over that four-story building down the street? While a super-hero may be asking too much, Microsoft plans on bringing us the next-best thing in Crackdown (Riot Act in Japan) on Xbox 360.

Players will take on a city literally packed with criminals as a super-modified uber-cop, laying waste to any baddie that stands between him and a clean city. These thugs aren't your run-of-the mill banger either. Organizing into three main factions, each with its own leadership and specialties, these criminals are bent on destruction and chaos.

Complete and utter freedom is the name of the game in Crackdown. There is essentially no linear mission structure to be found anywhere. Headed by Grand Theft Auto creator David Jones, his newest creation is the ultimate in sandbox-genre destruction. Plopped right in the middle of a three-way gang war, the player's only objective is to eliminate threats to the citizens of the city and keep the peace. There are no barriers to advancement to speak of and no bridges will be sectioned off. Everything in the game is wide-open right out of the box.

This structure allows for interesting strategies in advancing throughout the game. Players wishing to cripple the gun flow to the streets will be interested in finding, and eliminating, the officers of these gangs that handle weapon supply and distribution. Once eliminated, that factions foot soldiers may only be wielding hand-guns or SMGs instead of Assault Rifles or worse. This, of course, would be quite a difficult task for the rookie agent, so its recommended that players rip through a few lowly thugs to strengthen their characters.

Much like an RPG, players will gain experience by eliminating enemies on the streets by whatever means necessary. There are five attributes to gain skill points for: strength, shooting, explosives, driving, and agility. As you add more points to each category, that attribute increases. Characters with max strength will be chucking cars and gangsters like they are soccer balls, while max agility will allow a character to jump insanely far. The driving ability is really the only odd category of the bunch as it improves not the agent himself, but the vehicle provided to him by the agency. As this attribute increases, the Agency vehicles strewn across the city will transform before your eyes. The agency sports car turns into a cross between the Spy Hunter interceptor and the Batmobile, while the SUV gains the ability to jump over cars on the road. By adding these elements, Crackdown will have people coming for the action, but staying for the character improvement and payoff therein.

As Crackdown provides action that could easily be seen in your average super-hero comic book it's fitting that the developers have chosen to go with a comic-style look. Not quite cell-shading, the visuals are best described as a pseudo cell-shade with detailed 3-D modeling. Everything in the world will be loaded at one time, so there will be no waiting time to go from one neighborhood to another. During behind-closed-doors showings at E3, demonstrators took the debug mode to show the entire city at one time. This means that the arms dealer down on 5th Street will be there until you kill him, and the game engine keeps account of this at all times instead of having him "pop up."

Multiplayer has not been forgotten in the mix either. While taking out criminals all over the city, a second player can join in to help clean up the streets and gain skills points as well. The best part is that each player should be able to rampage on complete opposite sides of the city, or congregate on a single location if they wish, without the worry of being "apart" by a loading screen or invisible barrier. When the additional player wants to quit, he can return to his own city, unchanged from when he last left it.

Crackdown looks to advance the GTA formula far past what we are used to seeing in the current gen. The entire city is your playground, and the poor, unfortunate criminals are the targets of your destruction. Players will be able to have their combat and devastation their way when Crackdown hits the 360 as early as this October.