Crackdown Review

Platform: Xbox 360

Once upon a time, the cops screwed up so badly that gangsters managed to take over the world. The government then concentrated all its resources in a single city to prepare for a counterattack. As a part of this, they also began to make super soldiers. The sheer ridiculousness of this plot aside, you essentially play as a superpowered assassin. Don’t think of this as Assassin’s Creed, though, because this game forces you to be about as subtle as a howitzer. Then again, Creed wasn’t very good at that either.

The whole point of Crackdown is to kill all the leaders of the three gangs: Los Muertos (Mexicans), the Volk (Eastern Europeans), and the Shia Gen (Asians). While most of your victims make sense (they provide supplies, manpower, or information), some of them are just bizarre. For instance, one of the Los Muertos leaders supes up cars. Uhh . . . okay. That’s fucking dangerous. Luckily, these guys hide in very discreet places like oil rigs, the only skyscraper with a door, and the gym, so you don’t have to look long.

Control-wise, the commands are assigned to good positions, but the effects of pressing the buttons aren’t so sensible. For instance, pressing the melee attack button will make you kick, but you can’t control said kick for shit. Instead, you’ll probably miss by a mile, look like a ballerina in doing so, and either fall off a ledge to your horrible demise or get blown to smithereens by a grenade or four. Also, as the game progresses, you are able to jump higher and higher. Unfortunately, the controls lack sensitivity to the point that your choices are either to tap the jump button to hop like a morbidly obese ten year old playing basketball or to mash that fucker down and launch into orbit. Further complicating matters is the level design. As buildings get taller and taller, they become progressively more deformed, making them ridiculously difficult to climb. You’ll often find yourself slamming into an extended ledge or being stranded on the side of a building because the architect was on crack and decided to model it after one of Picasso’s faces,

Fortunately, there are ways to play such that you can avoid platforming. It’s called walking, and it’s a great way to get shot in Crackdown. Regardless, what you can’t avoid are gang showdowns. After you spend an hour or two pretending you’re Spiderman, you’ll probably stumble upon a gang hideout. At this point, your options are to either break down the front door and kill everything in sight or sneak in through the back door and kill everything in sight. Early on, this is simple enough since all you’re up against are a bunch of pea shooters and the occasional grenade. Things escalate, however, to the point that every schmuck with two hands touts 800 round machine guns, heat seekers, or cluster grenades. Combined with the fact that whenever you get blown up, you enter ragdoll physics mode and flop about helplessly for an eternity, you’ll often find yourself flying off rooftops while on fire and unable to do a damn thing about it. Hell, if you’re really unlucky, the enemies will chain heat seekers to juggle you in the air. Also, where the fuck is your backup? There’s a damn cop car on every street and the lazy bastards can’t stop by to lend you a hand?

On a quick note, one of the major features of the game is the ability to boost your skills. As the voiceover guy says, “Skills for kills, agent. Skills for kills.” I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that none of those s’s are z’s. For instance, as you kill more people with grenades, your explosives skill goes up, which makes your explosions a tad larger. When maxed out, you can annihilate entire intersections with a single rocket, which is pretty damn cool. On a less cool note, you can become a better driver by running enemies over. Yeah . . . good luck with that.

Let me get this out of the way: Crackdown is a damn fun game to fuck around in. To that end, all you have to do is download the Keys to the City pack to have access to a slew of cheats. When your car is invincible and goes 200+ mph, there’s no way you can’t have fun, unless you’re completely dull, in which case you can go play Too Human and tell yourself everything’s all right. All that aside, this is one frustrating son of a bitch to play seriously. Climbing poorly designed apartments and serving as little more than a volleyball for a bunch of trigger-happy gangsters to spike with rockets isn’t my idea of a fun time. Look elsewhere if you’re one of those obsessive perfectionist types that only live for plot and collectibles.

Rating: 3/5