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Don’t Back Down When You Crackdown By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman I’ve had Crackdown in my library almost as long as I’ve owned my 360. I had played it a couple times, but could never get into it. The game always came off as too confusing and constantly made me feel like I was doing something wrong. My sessions would consist of me: trying to find some sort of objective to make headway, getting terribly lost, and finally dying as I made my way back to the objective. The game frustrated me to no end to the point where I had written it off as a game that I was just too stupid to play. While it does seem kind of pointless reviewing a 2 year old game that’s essentially hit the bargain bin, it does make some sense. Recently, Crackdown has just been added to Xbox Live’s service of being able to purchase full retail games via download; which makes for a good excuse to talk about the game.
Though I originally saw Crackdown as frustrating and confusing, it’s actually not the case at all. In fact, you’ll realize that Crackdown is the polar opposite of a complicated open world game. Crackdown does away with missions, shops, and pretty much any semblance of a story; leaving you with a very arcade game feel in a sandbox game world. In the game, you play as member of a fictional government task force developed to “crackdown” on escalating crime problem plaguing Pacific City. Known only as “The Agent,” you are to take down 3 street gangs (which actually operate more like Al Quaeda or the Taliban and less like the Long Beach Crips) with nothing less than foot to ass and brutal force. The game is free roam enough to the point where you can pretty much play entirely to your own style; however, realistically the game does have a sort of logical flow. You take gangs out from the bottom up; starting with the lower ranking officers in the gang, eventually working your way up to taking out the gang’s kingpin. Each gang officer and kingpin act as a typical video game boss; however, there’s no having to accept missions to fight them or even working your way up to them through some convoluted copland story. You simply find them, rush them, and kill them. By taking out the officers you also affect the way the gang operates overall. For example, taking out the head of the gang’s vehicle distribution severely stunts the amount of cars the gang has at their disposal, likewise killing off their weapons dealer takes away a lot of their advanced guns.
As I mentioned before, there are also no shops for you in Pacific City; meaning if you want some new firepower, you’re going to have to take it from a thug. Aside from a very limited handful of very crappy firearms, every weapon you’ll be using in the game needs to be taken from a dead enemy. Naturally this has its advantages and disadvantages. On one hand you’ll never be without a loaded gun for very long, considering you melee someone to death for their gun if you’re desperately low on bullets. On the other hand, while it may be easy to find guns, it’s often hard to keep your guns. In order to save a gun for future use, you’ll need to run it back to an agency supply point (one of several spawn points). Though this may seem like a simple task, it’s actually hard to do if you’re in the middle of a firefight or boss hit and have a copious amount of guns to bring back (since one or more of those probably guns aren’t making it back).
Even though there’s not all of the stuff to do in Pacific City that you could do in any of the GTA cities (such as various jobs and side missions), you do have a very addictive diversion to keep you from becoming bored of killing gangsters. Scattered throughout the city are 800 colored orbs (500 green and 300 blue), most of the orbs are hidden on various rooftops and vantage points with a very small amount of them being hidden in corridors and alleyways. Not only do these orbs offer you a fun way to navigate through the city and learn the lay of the land, but every orb you collect slightly raises your agent’s stats (greens raise agility, while blues raise your: strength. driving, gun, and explosives stats). After awhile you’ll catch yourself tending to your gang busting duties as an almost secondary objective, as you begin to take new and out of the way routes to your next destination just to collect a couple more orbs. If the main campaign game really bores you, there’s a very fun mode called Keys to the City which is basically cheat codes mode. It never fails to put a grin on my face, to pick up a car and toss it into some gang kingpin’s face without worrying if I’m going to run out of health. Despite the fact that nothing you do in Keys to the City counts towards advancing the main campaign, it is very fun to see everything you can do in this game while pushing the game to its limits.
Overall the visual design and display of the game is top notch. I love the over the top/comic book style they took with designs and nearly everything in the game looks great. Explosions are gratifying, as are a lot of the effects you get to see while boundlessly running and jumping around. One thing that does look quite terrible in the game are the character models. I normally only play with the black guy, the pinoy (because he looks like Ron and it’s just fun sending that guy to his death at the hands of 20 gang goons), and the black guy you get in one of the DLC packages (it might the pay one, but either way it’s the one that looks like Xzibit). All the other characters available look completely alien (and maybe that’s for you, if you like extra terrestrial combat). The audio is decent, but annoying. The music is good at first, but really starts to get to you; however, I’ll admit that I never drove around much in the game, so I don’t know too much about the in car soundtrack. After about an hour of play and some “production” techno beat, I turned the game’s music slider to 0 and started playing Christmas CDs. The audio effects are just existential, aside from the explosions (which are great), everything else is just there. The voice acting is very hilarious, especially if you drink or smoke. The growling nags of the Agency Director are classic. Sometimes he’ll start telling you tutorial-esque things you learned hours before, sometimes he barks out some hilarious commentary on your play. My favorite was him screaming “is this your idea of a joke?!” after I had foolishly rushed a squadron of gang goons armed with homing missiles. The gangs’ voice acting all range between incredibly laughable to almost offensively stereotypical. Most notable is Mr. Wang’s raspy, Jerry Lewis-esque Oriental accent because it seems to occupy both ends of the spectrum at the same time.
All in all this is one of my favorite games on the Xbox360. I was pretty shocked that I originally hated this game and almost never played it again. For the current asking price of $20 (or less in some cases) you really can’t go wrong. Plus, it’ll be a good chance to catch up for the sequel, since there’s a huge plot twist in the game (which oddly enough is one of the only story points in the game as well).
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