E3 06: Crackdown Hands-On

LOS ANGELES--Crackdown, from Scotland-based developer Realtime Worlds (founded by the makers of Grand Theft Auto), is being shown at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in playable form. This game is a free-roaming action adventure that's mission-based. The wide-open urban setting makes it similar to the GTA games, but your character has superhuman abilities that give the game a pretty different feel. While the game still seems to have a way's to go, we had fun messing around with the character's over-the-top abilities.

The demo version was broken up into two sections. One let you roam freely and cause plenty of mayhem, giving you a good feel for the general action. Your superstrength lets you jump very high, letting you grab onto rooftops in some cases. You can pick up a lot of really heavy objects, such as cars, and toss them into your foes, most of whom are a bunch of scrawny-but-heavily-armed thugs.

You can fight back against the forces of evil--or, really, just about anything that gets in your way--using a variety of attacks. We saw a couple of different weapons in our time with the game, including an automatic rifle and a grenade launcher, which was great for blowing up cars. You can execute a few different melee attacks or toss objects at your targets. Keeping your targets in front of you is a breeze thanks to a pretty sharp lock-on system that lets you target specific body parts when you get up close.

Over time, your character's skills in different abilities will increase depending on how you use them. If you blast away enemies with guns, you'll earn points that help increase your gun skills. Running them over might make you a better driver, and so on.

In addition to the open-ended world, Crackdown is a mission-based game, and we were able to try out one mission that had us crashing through the gates of a heavily guarded compound from behind the wheel of a big rig. Mowing down guards by piling over them in a big-ass truck is pretty satisfying. The game will reportedly include 21 different missions spread across three different islands. The premise involves you playing as a secret agent with bionic powers, cracking down on a crime-ridden futuristic metropolis.

Crackdown has a good look to it, with some light cel-shading-like effects that give the game a very comic-book-like feel, which works in well with your character's superhuman status. The game seemed to run at a pretty smooth frame rate, and it showcased some very nice explosions, complete with physics action that sent car parts flying all over the place. There are no loading times in the game's huge, seamless environments, and it's impressive to be able to scale tall buildings, as well as fight in the streets. At one point, we climbed up on a water tower to catch a glimpse at the city's teeming crime all around, and then leapt from rooftop to rooftop, firing at the foes below.

In addition to the single-player mode, it's possible to play the game cooperatively, and we were able to test this out by getting in the passenger seat of our partner agent's sports car. The co-op potential for mayhem seems rather exciting, especially since the game will be playable on Xbox Live. Realtime Worlds' Crackdown looks promising from what we've seen so far. No release date for the game has been announced as of this time.