Crackdown has many great aspects that make it fun to play, easy to pick
up and hard to complete, which are most of the criteria of the best
games around.
At a glance crackdown may seem like one of those superhero games like
spiderman, but it is so much more; the details of the cities are so
intricate and the idea of upgrading different abilities in different
ways because of your special suit is a new and refreshing idea and a
good change from just happening because you are a super hero. The
abilities are well thought out and are increasingly hard to upgrade
with their being 4 levels and then the maximum level which takes a long
time to get them to. Some abilities are a bit easier than others to
upgrade such as agility but i feel it is just right because having good
agility is essential for progressing a lot in the game. On that point
the agility orbs are well placed and finding them gives you a sense of
achievement, especially with the hidden orbs.
The driving is pretty good for a game that doesn't use it particularly
much at all and i loved the way the agency vehicles adapt to your
driving skill and improve in performance and looks as you're driving
level upgrades.
The guns and shooting effects are pretty good, they could be better but
it is good which helps as you need your guns a lot during the missions.
The explosions are fantastic and once you've fully upgraded explosives
the effects are amazing and are quite addictive and you find yourself
deliberately blowing up innocent civilians just because you want to see
something blow up and there aren't any gangs around. However the lock
on system can get a bit annoying as you have to use it every other
minute and it does take quite a long time to properly lock on,
especially with headshots. Also i feel they could have expanded the
weapon base because as soon as you have the heavy machine gun, the
cluster grenade and the homing launcher, that's all you carry around and
they do get a bit boring.
The missions are extremely samey, where it gets to the point that you
just get as close as you can and pummel the boss with the homing
launcher. The last couple of bosses are a bit challenging because it
takes such a long time to get to them but only takes a maximum of a
couple of hours.
The whole game length is pretty poor because defeating the bosses does
not take long at all, the only thing that might take a bit of time is
upgrading the stats to the maximum, but once you've defeated the bosses there's not much point anyway except to get the achievement.
Great game for short bursts of fun and also an added bonus was that
most of us got the halo 3 beta test with it. Good game but don't expect
the game to last longer than a couple of weeks of moderate playing.
