The Next Level of Open-World Gaming
Crackdown sets that common knowledge on its head.
Visually, the game's visual style works. It isn't the most beautiful game on the market, but the comic book-like visuals work terrificly with this world and your super-powered secret agent. The world is vibrant, alive, and huge. From atop The Keep, you can see virtually all of Pacific City, and it is a large city. Slowdown is a major rarity (happened to be two times in about 40 hours of play)and load times outside of the initial load are non-existant.
The game has decided to not just go with a large world in terms of square mileage but to also include a VERY high world. The buildings get tall and the thrill of leaping three stories to catch a windowsill and vault up another three stories will suck you in. The game play handles terrificly. I am not thrilled with switching targets, but everything else is awesome. There is no lack of weapons and the three different gangs tend to have different weapon types, which is always good. The car handling is nightmarish early on, but the better you get at driving (improvement occurs, at least for me, mainly by running over enemies) the controls of the vehicles become better. The agency vehicles always seem to handle better than normal cars, but that is to be expected I suppose. The game's hook, though, is that your character is not human. He is a biomedically engineered superhuman. You can eventually toss around cars, have explosives cause massive explosions, aim incredibly well, and jump higher while running faster than any man can. It's like they took the exhiliration of the Spider-Man movie games and placed them here.
Difficulty is a bit of an issue as the game is not brutally difficult. If you take the gangs down in the order recommened, the final boss is almost a cakewalk. And, the more of the lower leaders of a gang you kill, the fewer the number of members you see around the section (which is a nice touch).
The game is laden with things to do. There are a total of 800 orbs to find, plus numerous rooftop races and several street races. The rooftop races are an absolute blast to play. You have a voice imploring you to do different things, but you can tune him out. The soundtrack of music in the cars, though, is not terribly good --- but they do try and have the music "fit" the gang that you're dealing with (Los Muertos, for example, tend to have Latin-flavored music).
The ending of the game, true, is quite bad and there is the occasional quibble, but it does not detract from how outstanding the title is. The achievements also are well done and give you a reason to try things you might not have tried otherwise.
You have to play this game. Few games are more enjoyable and this is better than the Godfather (which I liked a lot), Saints Row (which I also liked), and Just Cause (which I didn't like that much). Until GTA IV hits, this is the open world game to get.