The open world sandbox genre has often had you in the boots of a criminal like in the Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row series, but what about on the other side of the equation, what about the badge side? Well so games have you like the True Crime series and the game Sleeping Dogs as well as the game I’m reviewing this time Crackdown and on top of giving you a badge and a gun, the game even gives you superpowers. But are the superpowers you get put this game above the rest, or does it fall flat?
The game sets you in Pacific City, a modernish urban setting called Pacific City which is set on 3 islands complete with an industrial, residential, and commercial setting with various landmarks sprinkled around. As most sandbox games, the city itself can be a character and Pacific City is no different with the city varying across the map with apartment blocks to beach boardwalks to sky scrappers to factories and power plants that the difference in I found to be pretty cool to explore and jump around using your abilities.
The narrative itself sets the stage of a city besieged by crime and gangs across these 3 islands with each island being dominated by 3 separate powerful gangs. Each gang has its own “theme” to it with Los Muertos (Mexican Cartel), Volk (Russian Mafia) and the Shai-Gen Corp (Yakuza) making life for the citizens of Pacific City a living hell. To help combat these threats an organization simply call “The Agency” has used cutting edge genetic engineering to create a solution to this hell in the form of the player character also simply called “The Agent”. The Agent is imbued with several upgrades to standard humans such as an increased healing factor mixed with enhanced speed and strength of which you end up upgrading throughout the game.
Other then what I said above the narrative of the game doesn’t really expand from there outside the dossiers you get on each of the 21 gang bosses that you have to eliminate along the way with each gang having 6 underbosses and one gang leader. A cool thing though is that you can go after each boss as you see fit although when you get close to one the Agency Director (whose voice acting is pretty cool) will give you odds based on your current level of ablates and weapons and you can chose weather or not you wanna roll those dice.
Before I get into the gameplay I want to mention a major part of the game which comes in the form of a cool aspect with 5 upgradeable abilities for your Agent in the form of Shooting, Driving, Agility, Explosives, and Strength with each being upgraded with the collection of colored Orbs that correlate to the ability. As you collect more Orbs as you use those abilities such as killing enemies with guns gets you Shooting and gets you better accuracy, using melee gets you Strength and higher levels of that allows you to pick op heavy objects like cars and using grenades and rockets will get you Explosives and can make your explosives more powerful and larger. Driving and Agility Orbs are gained via races across Pacific City as well as having Agility Orbs strewn across the rooftops and alleyway giving someone who loves collectibles plenty of things to do.
Speaking of abilities and weapons, the game play of Crackdown is that of a third person shooter with driving and some platforming thrown in. First the shooting which plays a major part is pretty basic with a simple “lock-on” format. For weapons you have access to a variety of tools of destruction in the form of assault and snipe rifles, pistols, shotguns and even rocket launchers and grenade launchers although many of the weapons are really not that good with many just not being that accurate or powerful leaving me to use about two to three of the same weapons for 75% of the game. Second, third person platforming plays a major part with you having to traverse the city both horizontally and vertically to achieve your goals which becomes easier as you level up your agility ability. Third and defiantly least is the driving mechanic in the game, and it’s not at all good. The driving is at best sub par with car handling to be basically not at all well making high speed maneuvering a pain in the ass to master and in the city next to impossible unless you want to plow into a bunch of civilians. Plus the Ability Orbs can easily get your speed and jumping up to such as point early on that you’ll never really have to drive which makes the driving that much more pointless.
Combat plays an important role in the game and I have mixed feeling about it on a couple of levels. First, the enemy A.I is at best middling but aggressive with enemy troops being not very bright in the form of cover but god damn they make up for it in sheer numbers as well as there tenacity to go down fighting and frequently I’ve had to retreat simply to take a breather. I don’t mind aggressive A.I but I did find it pretty annoying when the enemy feels less like human gang members and more like swarms of enemy drones. Also as stated above the weapons of the game aren’t really what I would call diverse with each gang basically using the same weapons making it seem like the only real difference is different vehicles (somehow the Volk got a whole lot of fucking SCUD missile launcher into the country) and only like 3 weapons being useful.
Long Story Short: All in all, Crackdown is a mixed bag of a game. The platforming and combat parts of the game IMHO are pretty good and give Crackdown a unique edge over other sand box games of the like. But little things such as a lack of narrative and terrible driving controls knocks it down a little making the game feel like less of story and more of a plat form for testing out ideas, good ideas but the ideas don’t really feel that fleshed out which is quite unfortunate. That’s not to say it’s not a fun play, actually it’s really fun just to jump around the city and mow down enemy soldiers before throwing a semi at them, it’s just not really something to write home about.
THE GOOD
THE BAD
THE UGLY
- Lack of Narrative
- Lack of Weapon diversity
*All images from http://www.giantbomb,com
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