Released: 2007-02-20

Genre: Third Person Shooter

Platform:

Reviewed By: Joe Johnson

Dead or alive, you're coming with me

When Elliot Ness and the Untouchables went after Al Capone, they used tax evasion charges to bring him to justice. When I went after Jose Guerra of the Los Muertos Gang, I drove a fucking sports utility vehicle through his nightclub and ran him down in the parking lot.

Which do you think was more effective?

Crackdown is a game all about restraint, or a complete lack thereof. We’re not talking about restraint in the traditional, lets-not-let-them-massacre-children sense, but in the sense that the world opens before you like an after-hours Disneyland, allowing you to pursue your dreams without hindrance.

But, let’s backtrack here. You are the byproduct of years and years of genetic research, tissue augmentation and cloning technology conducted by The Agency. You have been bred, trained, and built with the sole purpose of protecting the peace—Robocop style—with a gun at your side and a license for mass destruction. Your mission is to rid Pacific City of the three major gangs corrupting it. The way you decide to go about it is entirely up to you, though murder is required.

The barely-present and instantly forgettable plot is merely an excuse to put you in the heart of this giant cityscape and let you run wild with a load of weaponry and comic book-inspired super abilities. Before the final credits roll, you will leap across skyscrapers, outrun cars traveling at top speed and punch a mini-van off of a highway overpass. In fact, you’ll do most of this in the first 10 minutes.

There are three gang bosses that must be eliminated in any order, plus a small army of lieutenants that are just itching to be killed by your hand. You can mount an assault on the head boss from the onset, or, you can choose to play it strategically and remove key figures to weaken the gang’s regime. There are no limits on how you carry out your mission, so long as you get the job done while trying to keep the civilian casualties relatively low, and even then, there’s such thing as “acceptable losses.”

You begin the game with a basic skill set that barely surpasses the average Olympic athlete. You can jump several feet into the air from a standstill, hurl a cinder block over a high rise building and shoot a criminal all before you hit the ground. These abilities come naturally. You’ll quickly fall into the groove of roaming the city, climbing from building to building, claiming Agency supply points and mowing down the criminal element. As you continue to use your skills, they increase in potency. Like blowing things up with grenades? The more you do it, the bigger your explosions will get, until you can wield a single limpet mine like a small thermonuclear device. The game rewards you for embracing the aspects of it you enjoy most, so continue doing what you are doing and, hey, you’ll get a prize.

Agility, however, requires a bit more work. There are 500 Agility Orbs scattered haphazardly around Pacific City, waiting for you to find them. Many are simple. Balconies overhanging a street, covered walkways, the orbs in these locations will net you a few experience points, but the larger ones require you to scale the highest buildings, searching for desperate handholds while the sounds of city life quickly vanish beneath you.

By the time you reach the four star agility rating, there is literally nowhere in Pacific City you cannot reach. Each building becomes a puzzle, daring you to climb the side of it by rebounding off of nearby buildings, using windows for footholds and making desperate leaps of faith above the vast unknown. When you reach the top of the highest building—the Agency Headquarters in the middle of the city—you can literally see the sun come up over the distant horizon. Then, you can drive your SUV right off the building and watch it crash spectacularly towards the ground.

It’s this amazing level of freedom that makes Crackdown a definitive title on the Xbox 360. The designers seem to realize that, as gamers, we often want to head off the beaten path and approach things at our own pace. Sometimes, we just want to say bugger the plot and get down to the business of kicking a drug lord off a building while juggling his near-corpse in the air with heat seeking rockets. You can even invite a friend to help you screw around in this giant playground on Xbox Live.

There are drawbacks, of course. The narrator—a poor man’s Adam West if ever I heard one—is annoying and endlessly repeats the same tips, tricks and warnings to you long after you’ve memorized them. Enemy fire may occasionally tear you down, but there isn’t much challenge when your character endlessly respawns—I’m sorry, is recloned—at the nearest supply point. You could also argue that the casual simplicity of the title doesn’t lend itself to a lengthy experience, unless you embrace the open-ended nature of the title.

But it’s that embrace that makes the title worth your time. While Grand Theft Auto may have invented the bustling free-roam cityscape, Crackdown has revitalized it, giving players not only a world worthy of exploring, but a means to do so without restraint. This is a world where any sight you see can be reached and every object in the environment can be used as a weapon. It’s far from perfect, but then, when was the last time you hurled someone’s corpse into the ocean just because you could?