Crackdown is a brilliantly fun concept; if only it weren't so poorly executed
In concept, the idea is solid. In execution, it's anything but. The game simply falls short at every hurdle. The complete lack of structure doesn't feel like unparalelled freedom, instead coming across simply as an unfinished game. And on that note, if i were a betting man, i'd happily wager that that was the case. You can almost picture the board meeting:
"Well, the game-world is finished and ready. The physics engine is working. The character models are done. Now what?"
"Next, we have to actually make the game..."
"Ah... but we only have four dollars and a week of development time left."
"Box it up son, this game's releasing anyway."
So what gameplay is there? Surely there's SOMETHING to be accomplished in this sandbox? Well yeah, there is, in the form of three gangs which each control one island on the map. Though they're different in appearance, from the Latino group "Los Muertos" to the eastern-european mobsters "The Volk" to the evil "Shain-Gen" corporation, however the differences stop there. The three gangs behave in exactly the same manner; namely roaming the streets, not really doing anyone any harm. They happily leave you alone until you first open fire and kill one of their members, at which point they develop a natural hostility to your presence. There are no gang-wars. No drive-by shootings. No battles for territory. Indeed, it's hard to see exactly what the narrator is talking about when he begins the game with an overview of how the city has become enveloped with crime. Regardless, it's up to you to take these gangs out. Each group has a series of "gang bosses" who sit in various buildings around the game-world, surrounded by an absurd number of henchmen. As a genetically-enhanced agent, it is up to you to charge into these buildings and gun down hundreds upon hundreds of infinately respawning henchmen before taking down the boss himself. After eliminating all of these bosses in any order you like, you can move on to the King Pin, who will be weakened by fewer men and poorer weaponry thanks to the lack of his bosses. Removing the king-pin removes the gang.
After that you move on to.....
Actually, that's it. In essence, that's Crackdown. You can beat it in a single sitting, however there are many contrived add-ons to coerce you into returning and not searching for your receipt. One of these is the stats meter, which increases as you shoot, drive, make things explode and collect any of the five hundred agility orbs littered about the city. All of these are tied to achievements, in the hope that addicts will hold on to the game long enough to score all of the points.
It's not worth it, however. The hidden-package hunt of GTA is basically ripped into Crackdown, only taken to rediculous extremes with a tedious five hundred orbs to collect. Finding them all brings about no satisfaction whatsoever, only a sense of relief that such a chore has finally been completed; now you get to move on to the 300 "hidden orbs". Whoopdy-doo.
The mechanics of the game itself are probably its biggest issue. Like the old saying goes, Crackdown attempts to be jack of all trades, but ultimately ends up master of none. Shooting is a sordid affair of simply holding the left trigger, at which point the game automatically targets an enemy for you to gun down. Rinse and repeat. Despite such ludicrous ease, the game has a wonderful obsession with targeting cars and dead bodies before allowing you to fire on the goon standing ten foot away with a heavy machine gun opening up on you. It also targets peace-keepers, your allies who open fire on you should you do so much as clip one of their cars by mistake. I wish i was joking.
Driving is incredibly dull, until you manage to max out your driving stats by completing races and running over goons. Ninety percent of the cars on the street are slow family sedans with the turning arc of a double-decker bus, resulting in you having to trek back to the agency headquarters to grab the supercar every time you need a car for any serious activity. Everything else will be far too slow for a race, or far too weak to take to a fight.
The only thing to really work well is agility. You can jump onto high rooftops with ease, hop around the city at will. Again however, this is fatally flawed as you are genetically enhanced with the ability to jump onto a sky scraper, but jumping back down will kill you. You can jump onto a ledge with ease, but god forbid there be a bit of gutter above your head, because that's an immovable, unnavoidable obstacle in the world of crackdown which will halt any climbing progress at once.
It's not all bad. The graphics are a nice, odd sort of cel-shaded but not cel-shaded affair. There are a decent number of weapons to tool around with, and simply exploring the city itself is fun, though it isn't especially large and there's not much to do once you've completed the 14 races.
Sure, i'm taking a somewhat negetive viewpoint here, and there is definately fun to be had in Crackdown. A game like this cements the negetives however, as it's clear that so much potential has been wasted. The game falls just short of the gate in everything it attempts to do, and many of the mechanics seem geared toward frustrating you, rather than allowing you to enjoy the game. Why do the peacekeepers try to murder me for the tiniest of crimes? Why does the auto-targeter pick out peacekeepers in the middle of a firefight? Why does killing civilians decrease my stats when you litter the streets with them and plot a race-course right through huge crowds of them?
Why Crackdown? Why? At the end of the day, you'll have some fun screwing around in Pacific City, but as one negetive aspect after the last rears it's ugly head, you'll ultimately end up taking the game out of your console and sighing, as i did, "that's another one for the trade-in pile."
*but hey, at least it comes with a two-week Halo 3 beta