Let's get crackin'! Crackdown was released way back in 2007 and even came with a Halo 3 beta code, old right? It was one of the first dozen games I played on the 360 (also the game I was playing when I first witnessed the red ring of death! D:) and also the one of the first open world games I played on 360 too.
Crackdown is about an agency trying to bring down the crime in the city. You are an agent who becomes faster and stronger the more you build up your skills. There are three major gangs and each has seven targets for you to wipe out. Some are really difficult and a pain to get to so you want to play careful sometimes.
This game is so fun. Jumping around on rooftops and climbing buildings, blowing shit up, it's awesome. Leveling up your abilities is addicting and watching your scrawny agent change over time in to a huge beefcake makes you feel tough and it's easy on the eyes! Beating the crap out of enemies and throwing things like boxes and cars (if you're strong enough) is way more fun than shooting them.
The games story is pretty non-existent, you get the objective of 'cleaning up the city' and more or less get on with it. The only story related type of cutscenes are the updates about the boss you've discovered, when you've killed a boss and when you've wiped out a gang. They're also pretty boring so you'll most likely skip them. You have a handler in the form of a voice over, the voice is cool but when he chimes in all the time moaning at you to do stuff, I'd often greet him with a "STFU". What's really good about this game, is that you pick which boss to go after if you've discovered their location, the game isn't linear and let's you go where you choose.
The graphics are beautiful, they're in the form of cell shaded (the first game I'd even seen in this type, yes, a game of many firsts it turns out). I loved taking out the gang bosses, it felt so good to rid the city of one less boss. They were pretty difficult at times and you know you were making progress when you took one out. One cool feature was being able to target different limbs so you could disarm people or make them fall over. There's also a pretty good selection of weapons and a huge variety of cars to drive. The sound of the guns and the explosions was music to my ears. There were also a bunch of different agents for you to play as and you could also customise them but it was pretty limited. This is a great game to play in co-op and it's much more fun, so grab a buddy or make a friend if need be.
Some of the controls took some getting used to X to switch weapons and LB to reload were off putting. Your agent doesn't talk and there were no feelings I felt towards them and whenever you died you could just respawn, it just made you feel like you were expendable. Even though the limb targeting was a good idea, it was very frustrating at how easy it was to accidentally aim at their arms over their torso. It was also annoying how quick you could be overwhelmed by a few enemies, dying so fast even if you were a highly skilled agent. Also being able to aim at dead bodies was a pain, especially if you were in a big gun battle trying to kill the living rather than continuing to shoot the recently deceased. I found grenade throwing poor too as it seemed to hardly go anywhere and always seemed to damage me no matter where I stood. The driving handling was quite difficult but I preferred to run and jump around instead, it was so much better.
The game had a bunch of side stuff too like road races and rooftop racing to help your stats grow. There wasn't much else that added to the game that felt worth doing. The game was quite buggy too which I noticed more recently than back in the day. Some bosses just didn't seem to spawn, so I'd have to go to a completely different part of the map and then go back and hope they'd show. Some enemies would just flash and dissappear and would show up again when you had your back to them and were vulnerable. It made the game seem cheap. Not grabbing ledges despite facing them and losing progress of climbing a ridiculously tall building never made sense either.
Crackdown is soon to be a trilogy and I'm glad it's a game that's been a success and spawned more games. I'm surprised by how happy I was when the third game was announced at E3, I guess I liked it more than I thought. I for one am really looking forward to what CD3 will bring and will certainly plan to write a few words on it. Until then Crackdown.
7.1/10
No comments:
Post a Comment