Crackdown 1 was a fun game. I borrowed it from a friend and played it after my girlfriend bought my 360 for Mass Effect. I liked that the game got me used to playing the 360 and its controls so that I could be good for when ME and GTAIV came out. I liked the collectiness of the game, even if I never did completely get all the orbs (who did?). So, when I heard about Crackdown 2, I associated it with fond memories of jumping, climbing and general carnage. I looked forward to it and thought it would be a reliable summer release. Unfortunately, I was both right and wrong.
Two minor notes before the real review starts:
1) I did not play multiplayer as I refuse to pay for online gaming (I have a silver XBOX Live membership which means nothing unless you like to be at the top of leaderboards for Shadow Complex).
2) I played this game on Ruthless (which is akin to normal as it was the middle difficulty), so any gameplay frustrations may have been due to my playing on too hard a level, or just that I suck.
Crackdown 2 really should have been called Crackdown 1: Part 2. I say this not because nothing has changed except the story, but instead because the things that have changed are minor at best. The core game experience is almost exactly the same as the original. For some franchises, that wouldn't be a bad thing. For the Crackdown franchise, it is practically a death knell. In fact, for any open-world action/semi-RPG franchise, to not change and evolve (a key part of the actual game) in a world of GTAs, Assassin's Creed's, and Infamous' is not only stupid but practically begging for the bargain bin. That is why I rated this game so low, for every single part of the game that was fun, I realized another game had done it better, and likely done so years earlier, so that it would not have been much of an effort for Ruffian to have incorporated those concepts into this "new" game. I will get to these things later, but first, the “story.”
In Crackdown 2, you are given control of an "Agent" after a lengthy intro cut-scene where the "story" is partially explained to you and then taken on a short tutorial. Then you are forced to do a few "missions" in order to get your foot in the water as it were. I say “story,” because most of it is explained to you by your trusty pain-in-the-ass overlord narrator man who is constantly directing you around in his deep, commanding voice. He tells you what you should do next, what things there are to do nearby and why you are not supposed to kill civilians (he tells you this a lot, trust me). This is fine for the first few hours, but after a while he starts to grate because all he is doing is interpreting your mini-map for you, which any person who has ever played this type of game before knows how to do extremely easily. So my question is, were they trying to market this to new gamers, because who in their right mind would go after a game like this as their first experience of an open-world game?
Anyways, the story is simple, Pacific City is no longer full of gangs, but freaks: mutants who have been infected by some virus and come out at night to feast upon the citizens of Pacific City. Your job is to activate power generators (or absorption units if you want to be specific) and then drop light-bombs into their lairs in order to kill them all. On top of this, you have to fend off a rival militant group called The Cell, run by some “evil” woman who is against the agency. You fight them by taking back territory that they control by activating a drop point and then killing them en masse. This is pretty much how the entire “story” progresses, except for one part: audio logs. You can collect audio logs just like any other orb in the game, except you have to push a button, as they are dispersed throughout the world just like all the other collectibles. The ridiculous thing about these audio logs is that they give you more storyline through their short, 10-30 second dialogues than the actual game does in its entirety. Through these audio logs you learn how the freak virus came to be, who controls it, if there is a vaccine, and the origin of the leader of The Cell. I listened to one audio log and then I went online and used an interactive map to find every other one because I was so desperate for a story. Also, the finale of the game almost requires that you have listened to the audio logs in order to understand it in its entirety. In this respect, Crackdown 2 completely fails. What they had was an opportunity for an interesting FarCry-like storyline and what they gave us was two cut-scenes, a bunch of audio logs and a whole lot of grinding in between. It would be easy, if you didn’t play this game all in one go as I did (because I rented it), to have completely forgotten the parts of the story you had paid attention to in between your plays.
Game-play in Crackdown 2 is exactly like game-play in Crackdown 1. You have an Agent, they have powers that give them superiority over all normal enemies, and those powers evolve/improve as you use them or collect orbs. The weaponry in C2 is pretty much exactly the same as C1 as far as I can recall, minus a few additions which are geared towards killing freaks. Weaponry is a large part of the game, since most of your time will be spent either killing things, or jumping around collecting things. Killing things in C2 is pretty fun, well it is at first. Punching and kicking the crap out of people and launching them into the air with rockets is all well and good, but you can do that in C1 for a lot cheaper. But get into the later stages of the game, and it is no longer possible to get close to the fray. Either you are being shot up by six big guys with mini-guns and homing rocket launchers or you are being knocked on your ass by 15 foot tall freaks that destroy your shields in one hit and then take out two of your life bars by kicking you (or just standing on top of you while others hurt you). That is what C2 considers a challenge, cheap enemies that you have to kill from ridiculously far off in order to survive. You can also use vehicles to kill things, which is also fun at first. Then you realize that the cars are all broken in some way. Either they are too weak, too slow, too fast (yes, it is possible), or simply unmaneuverable. A few of the cars have built in gun turrets, which is fine except that they do not have a locking mechanism so it is impossible to hit anything unless you are mindlessly shooting into a crowd. I would tell you that the tank is ok, except that I didn’t get it because I hated cars so much.
Killing aside, a great deal of your time will also be spent collecting things in order to get the highest agility level so that you can climb the tallest towers and defeat The Cell in those locations. Unfortunately, all of the bridges and roads in Pacific City have been mangled or destroyed due to the freaks, so getting anywhere with a car is a massive pain. Ergo, you will travel mostly on foot. This is probably the most fun part of the game; just running around, climbing and jumping up buildings and flying (once you achieve the maximum level of agility, your suit becomes a semi-functional glider). Unfortunately, it too suffers from major issues, mainly that other games have done it all better. You notice this problem the most when you have to traverse some of the tallest buildings and find that there is only one path to get up them. As you follow along this predetermined path, you will constantly be hindered by the controls of the game. The agent will only grab onto a ledge when he is facing it directly, he can’t be off more than five degrees in either direction or he will simply ignore the ledge entirely. Also, ledges are not nearly as obvious in C2 as they are in games like Assassin’s Creed and Infamous (not that those games are faultless, but they are a lot better than this one), so you may find yourself jumping and trying to grab onto what you think is a ledge, but really isn’t. Admittedly, this doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it is a pretty frustrating problem. When your agility level maxes out, you get access to the “wingsuit.” This thing is intended to reduce your travel time and allow you to access different areas. Unfortunately, no one ever tells you how to use it. Maybe there is a tutorial in the manual or a help section in the menu that I failed to read, but the narrator never tells you this, he simply tells you that the only way to learn how to use it is to practice. I think that this is ridiculous. To force us to learn something that is supposed to be fun by trial and error without the help of a guided tutorial is mean. I only used the thing at first to glide to areas just past my jumping range. Later, after I jumped off a really tall building, I learned that you could actually use it to fully fly all the way around the island without losing much altitude at all. But how the thing is useful, I have no idea. That was how I felt about most of the maximum levels of the abilities. Mostly, you could have gone through the entire game on the first level (except maybe agility and strength as they define how much health you have) and not have needed the advanced level things.
As for presentation, this game looks and plays pretty well. It is not a great looking game, except for your agent, who looks cool as he evolves. However, I did not experience any texture pop-in or any slowdowns the entire game. It froze on me once, but I have no idea if that was my machine or something else. Essentially C2 looks exactly like C1, with a few minor tweaks, although I think you would be hard pressed to find them. Explosions look good (for Hollywood-style with lots of gasoline) and fire looks the same as it did in C1. One thing that I loved about C1 that was completely missing in C2 was the evolution of the cars. In C1 every agency car would evolve as your agents driving ability did. This turned the supercar eventually into an awesome batmobile, the SUV into a massive monster-truck and the semi-trailer truck into an evil, armored Maximum Overdrive truck. Essentially, getting level 5 gave you some super sweet rides that looked really cool. C2 lacks that coolness that was there in C1.
While I am a total proponent of re-using an engine for a sequel (like Bioware will with Dragon Age 2), I feel like Crackdown 2 did this without any work on the story. I know the game looks better than Crackdown did, but I never noticed it in the first game, and I wasn’t awe-struck by the graphics in this game either. Essentially Crackdown 2 is a bit more robust a version of Crackdown but with a few features removed as well. Also, I hate killing monsters. If you gave me the choice to kill people or monsters, I would kill people every single time, which is probably why I never played through the Halo franchise. So, for me, the addition of freaks is really a bad addition to a game that was fun when you had to kill different gangs and use different tactics for each one. That is another problem, there is no real variety to the main story. You simply rinse and repeat the exact same formula over and over again on ever island. In conclusion, if you thought Crackdown was one of the most fun games you ever played and you haven’t played any of the other open-world games I mention in this review, you probably will not notice most of these flaws and might have fun. If you have played those games or do get frustrated easily, stay away from this game. For me this game was an exercise in patience, every single beacon I activated later in the game came with several deaths and all of them felt cheap and ridiculous. I do not recommend this game unless you are an avid fan of the series and are obsessed with collecting. Even then I suggest you just go back and replay the old game.