Published by Microsoft

Developed for the Xbox 360 by Real Time Worlds

Rating – “M for Mature” Contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Use of Drugs

In Crackdown you can leap tall buildings in a single bound, toss cars around like beach balls, and deliver a kick with all the force of an angry mule on steroids. A solid punch will send a villain flying backwards, head over heels. If this sounds an awful lot like Superman from the 1930’s or Neil Armstrong on the moon, it’s because physics is the star and for you and you alone, gravity is decreased by up to 15 times. You have all the benefits of someone from another planet. The effects appear slowly at first and scale upwards as you play the game. The more you play and complete goals, the more dramatic your powers become. This is what makes the game insanely addictive.

It’s certainly not the game’s style or story. Crackdown suffers from one of the worst first impressions in video game history. The graphics are a strange attempt to try to mix the thick, comic book lines and primary colours of cel shading with the 3D realism used by most modern action games. The result ends up being neither and can be hard on the eyes until you get used to it. The game’s concept is a juvenile fantasy. You play a nameless, voiceless, “Super Agent”, a thick muscled, generic action figure man sent out to fight gangs of bad, racial stereotypes. One part of the city is overrun by a Latino gang with tuned cars, loud music and rapper clothing while another is run by Russian mobs with thick, vodka accents and cold, industrial looks. The final section of the game is ruled by an Asian Triad that delivers hissing insults from maroon town cars and atop corporate penthouses draped in red décor.

If it were up to me, I would have defined the three gangs as spammers, telemarketers, and spyware creators. Add in some phishers, virus writers, and drive-by pharmers and I could happily shoot them all day. Game designers looking for villains beyond the tired choices of racial gangs, Nazis, zombies, and WWII soldiers need only look online for modern bad guys to fight. Sure, it might be hard to explain why online thieves are carrying automatic weapons, but I’m sure everyone would be willing to suspend their disbelief.

For parents concerned that their kids will spend hours shooting racial stereotypes, you won’t have to worry as the controls are extremely frustrating at first, partly because the idea is for you to improve your skills over time, but as someone who has finished the game, I can tell you they never really reach the level they should. Although you can drive (and steal cars just like Grand Theft Auto) you’re more likely to run the car into the wall.

You can use a wide selection of pistols, rifles, machine guns, and grenades, but aiming them is a flip of the coin. You can’t point-and-shoot with any accuracy, so instead you have to point the reticule in the general vicinity of the person you want to shoot and then hold down the left trigger to have it “snap to” your target. More often than not the game will choose to “snap to” the nearest garbage bin, parked car, just about anything other than the person filling you with lead and rapidly ending your life. Although there are plenty of railings, cement walls, and parked cars around to act as partial cover, you’ll find that your character’s ability to shoot is deactivated as long as he is standing next to something. Instead he’ll choose to perform a melee attack which is useless when you have gunmen shooting at you from ten feet away. This inability to properly defend yourself in these moments is an outrage.

For the past few weeks I’ve used the Xbox Live online service to watch the progress of my colleagues in the press and noticed that, like myself, they quickly gave up on the shooting aspect of the game and instead resorted to playing it like comic book characters of old. Traveling across cities by jumping from rooftop to rooftop turns out to be more fun than driving. Defeating gangs of henchmen by comically punching them or throwing lamp posts at them is actually better than shooting them (that is, until you get the heat-seeking rocket launcher, which in a game where physics is the star, changes everything).

The strong point in Crackdown is the architecture. The city sections are vast, incredibly detailed, and an absolute joy to explore. Most buildings have a more intricate interior, filled with stairway systems, cave networks, and penthouse lifts, than their exteriors. The game’s main goal is to locate and eliminate the leaders of each gang, a task made pleasurable only because each is holed up inside an intricate compound and finding a way into their headquarters, using your ability to jump, climb, and find hidden entrances is the height of the game’s experience.

While most buildings can be scaled by using the window sills as hand-holds, several have smooth walls and seem at first impenetrable. Others are oddly shaped structures, with geodesic domes, industrial cranes, and fantastic, larger-than-life statues. It’s important to know that none of the buildings are impossible to climb, that for each and every structure, even the tallest there is a way to the top, and getting there can be a consuming task that will keep you busy for hours.

Once you eliminate a gang leader, that part of the city reaches a state of peace with no one left to fight. In fact once you “finish” the game, you will be left with the entire city complex devoid of a single enemy to fight, and you are free to keep exploring. This is where the Xbox 360’s Achievements system helps and thanks to the list of crazy goals for you to try for, is where the game offers the most fun.

Can you find all 500 green agility orbs, each placed on the delicate, precarious rooftops of the city’s structures? Can you find all 300 blue orbs, hidden inside the secret passageways and interior levels of the most complex buildings? Can you use the rocket launcher to “juggle” a car in the air for seven seconds? Can you climb the vertigo-inducing Agency Tower, the tallest building in the game and then dive off of it and successfully land into a small pond (why they didn’t go all the way and offer a just a cup of water…).

It’s these activities and more that make Crackdown addictive, that and the option to have a second player join you in a co-operative mode. It’s so much easier to play with the game’s physics, to build ramps to launch cars off of, to stack giant piles of cars, when you have a friend helping you out. In retrospect, Crackdown is a horrible and mis-leading title, but then marketing the game as a violent shooter is what will get it sales.

Just to confirm, Crackdown is exclusive to the Xbox 360 console and will not be available for other systems.