Review - Crackdown

Xbox 360
Newish Release
$60

In Crackdown, one plays a superhuman cop wandering around a large city, looking for nests of criminals to kill. It is a lousy, shallow game. The stages are uninventive and repetitive, each one consisting of a buttload of generic thugs with a tougher boss in the center of them. As the game progresses, the number and durability of thugs increases. Combat is simple and dull, with autofiring ranged combat, a single melee attack, and the cool factor of being able to throw at people wears off once one realizes that it is stupidly hard to hit anyone with those cars.

Yet, as cruddy as this game is, I’m almost glad I bought it, and not just for reasons rhyming with “Shmalo 3 beta.” You see, the city in this game is built vertically and the badass hero character is capable of jumping increasingly great distances. This means that one can spend the game climbing buildings and leaping rooftops. Running and jumping and climbing were some of my greatest pleasures as a child, and Crackdown rekindles those passions. There is real joy to be had from Crackdown by climbing as high as one can, and seeing how far across the city one can get before being forced to cry “No more roof!” Crackdown might be the first sandbox game where traveling to your objective is consistently more fun than achieving your objective.

The city in Crackdown is large, beautiful, and built for climbing. I generally place a higher premium on gameplay than on graphics, but the first month I had my 360, I was playing Crackdown just to soak in the visuals. From a high enough vantage point you can look all the way across the city, and this game is all about high vantage points. I enjoyed the map so much it made the lack of anything in the map all the more frustrating.

A game that manages to be fun in spite of its actual gameplay is an odd anomaly. Does a video game actually have to be a game? Could a game that provided a city to stomp around in without any objectives or goals be a worthwhile, complete product? People who enjoy Animal Crossing might believe in non-games, but I haven't seen a satisfying game built to those specs yet. Jumping around Crackdown was genuinely fun, but ultimately it was an empty exercise. Playing it, I kept wishing I had something to do, something to justify the game. Climbing buildings and looking for hidden orbs (I found 498 out of 500 Agility Orbs before giving up) just didn’t add up to a satisfying experience when all was said an done. I think video games need concrete objectives.