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| Difficulty: 1 | Learning Curve: 1 | Published by: sjohn | Date: 2007-03-01 |
| Gameplay | | 9
| Graphics | | 9
| Sound | | 10
| Value | | 9
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Crackdown, as most everyone knows comes with an “invite” to the Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta, this of course is one of the deciding factors in buying the game for quite a lot of people. This should not be the case though, the game has many merits which justify the purchase and I am sure you will agree after playing it for a few hours. Some of the best parts of the game are not directly tied to the story; it’s how you progress through the game gaining more power in order to do your job more efficiently. Your job in the world of Pacific City is to rid the three islands of all crime. In order to do your job you will need to kill 21 boss characters, and more than likely thousands of other gang members.
This game is an open world game, much in the same vein as Grand Theft Auto, after all some of the lead designers worked on the original series. But as far as Grand Theft Auto was open horizontally, Crackdown seems to go more three dimensional, as you will not only be running and driving around the streets of the three gang territories, you will also be climbing to roof tops of the local buildings and jumping to and fro in order to improve your abilities, to sneak into the boss compounds, and to try and finish the foot races in the least amount of time possible.
Crackdown takes its skill progression in a way so that you will get better at what you actually enjoy doing in the game. Whether you like just shooting gang members, jumping to the tops of buildings to find Agility orbs (markers which increase your skill), driving around doing stunts, or just blowing things up. If you enjoy doing it, and do it enough, you will get better at it. Of course, later in the game you will definitely need these skills in order to kill those who wish harm upon you. Firearms skills help with accuracy and speed of firing off precise shots. Where Explosive skills increase the range of the detonation of your grenades and rockets, and other items such as car gas tanks, and barrels filled with flammable contents.
Most games of this sandbox variety try to throw many side missions in so that you will stay busy when you are either bored with the story or just want to do something else. In Crackdown these options are quite limited. You will only be able to do the story, go on rampages, do either driving or running based races, or hunt for orbs that are scattered around the city. There are no delivery missions where you need to get certain items or people from point A to point B. This is both good and bad, it keeps you focused on the story, but it also shows how lacking the story really is. You can basically play through the game using the same formula for every boss, run in, evade the guards, and kill the boss. You don’t even have to escape afterwards, if you die, a clone of you with your stats comes back and you are free to continue on with the mission at hand. The later bosses add some variety such as some simple puzzles to get the boss into the open.
The graphics are very good on the game; the draw distance is the best I’ve witnessed so far. You can ascend to the top of the tallest building in the middle of the city, and literally see for miles in pretty good detail. If you can see it on your screen, you can find a way to get to that point. The graphics also have a hint of cell shading which makes this super hero game seem much more like a comic book that you are able to play through, especially after you gain some higher level abilities.
The sound on the game is really meant to be played on a 5.1 Surround Sound setup. The bullets whizzing by your ears, the explosions in the distance, and the sound systems in the cars are all built around your in game character. The environmental sounds are phenomenal as you not only hear the traffic going by, but phones ringing in office buildings, water crashing onto the shore on the beaches, the birds in the mountains, everything they did with the sound engine makes the city seem much more alive.
This game is definitely one of the best games I have played on the Xbox 360. I am somewhat worried about longevity of it, as you may become bored of it shortly after finishing everything there is to offer at the moment; however, Microsoft Game Studios is promising extra content for the remaining 100 gamerscore soon, and this content will be based off of what the players are doing in order to improve their fun, so that should at least add a few more hours of game play later this year when they release that. Look for my upcoming Co-Op review covering only that portion of this game coming soon.
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