Crackdown 2 quick thoughts.

 I picked up Crackdown 2 and played about three hours of it. This is my story.

            I enjoyed the first Crackdown, surprisingly I didn’t buy it for the Halo “beta”. The hunt for orbs kept me searching and searching the world for hours. So when I loaded up the second one I enjoyed seeing how the world had changed. Instead of killing an endless supply of cronies while trying to get to the boss at the top, this time you are turning on three beams so you can drop a light bomb on the freaks….completely different.

            There are also day and night cycles in this one. During the day you fight gang members and then at night you fight freaks, mutated gang members. There are interesting light weapons you can use against the freaks. I found a light grenade and a light shot gun that really helps. But the light grenade does nothing against the gang members and since you can only carry one grenade at a time, this is kind of a pain in the neck.

            To turn on the beams you have to stand on a pad for 10 to 15 seconds to power it up. Before you can stand there you have to take out a small army of gang members. I found it easy to clear these gang members out. Once you have activated three beams you move to the Freak Lair and have to stop the freaks from attacking the light bomb. It takes a few minutes to power up and armies of freaks show up to attack. The game will mark certain freaks that do extra damage to the bomb so you should rush over there to attack them. This part I found slightly annoying. Each time I tried to detonate a light bomb I would fail on the first attempt and get it the second. The freaks always go to the same place so on second attempt it is much easier to protect it.

            I cleared the first island of the game. That was turning on 9 light beams and detonating 3 light bombs. Each detonation was the same thing in a slightly different looking cave. You can also attack gang strong holds. This involves killing a certain amount of gang members in the area. Once you start these a bar appears in the right corner of the screen. It goes down as you kill each gang member.

            Find the Orbs is still really fun. The game starts off by putting you somewhere with an objective but there were tons of Orbs around the area so I just went collecting those instead of killing gang members. Eventually I went and did what the announcer told me to do but there was no penalty for doing your own thing and collecting orbs.

            If you enjoyed the first game go ahead and check this out. If you like open world games where you can hunt for power ups, go and grab this game. If you like open world games with good shooting and driving, then you might want to not grab this game.