Crackdown does a fantastic job of making you feel like a superagent, with a vast city to explore and rid of human scum.
The game takes place in a third person perspective, and from the outset you are allowed to explore the entirety of Pacific City. The city is divided into 3 main islands, and each is dominated by one of the 3 crime syndicates. Your primary goal is to take out the Kingpin of each of those crime syndicates. However, at the outset of the game those Kingpins fortresses are heavily fortified. Each of the Kingpins is supported by 6 generals, and by taking out these generals, you weaken the Kingpins defences. For example, take out the general that handles weapons distribution, and the Kingpins bodyguards will start sporting lower grade weapons. Take out the general who handles recruitment, and there will be less bodyguards to deal with. When you approach a fortress, the game is helpful enough to give a percentage chance of success based on your current stats and defeated generals.
Of course, The Agency doesn't know where these fortresses are, so it is up to you to explore the city and find them. Once you get near a fortress, you will receive an updated dossier and the location added to your map. Occassionally you may get a random update if you have been wandering around without finding anything, so you will never be completely lost. There are also supply points around the city, which are usually located in high places. When you die, you can respawn from any supply point around the city, as well as restock your ammo. You can only hold 2 weapons at a time, and for all the money spent on bioengineering you, you think they would be able to supply you with some decent weapons. The first weapons you have are servicable, but you will want to replace them as you come across tougher enemies. Once you collect guns from dead enemies, you can take them back to supply points, and they will remain available to use for the rest of the game.
Combat is simple. Holding the left trigger locks on to the nearest target, pull the right trigger to shoot. That might make it sound simple, and it is, but the combat is often intense because you face so many enemies at once. Once a target is locked, you can use the right stick to target a specific area of the body. This hardly comes into play as it doesn't yield much benefit; only head shots deal major damage, but it takes a long time for the reticule to home in. You can also home in on petrol tanks, and blow cars up with a well-placed shot. The targeting system works well the vast majority of the time. There will be occassions where it targets cars behind the bad guys or not the specific guy you want to aim at, but these issues are fleeting and usually don't impact on your success. Killing enemies with bullets upgrades your aiming skills, and the reticule tightens faster once you lock on.
You can take out your enemies with brawn as well as bullets. You can do this by either walking straight up to them and giving them a hefty kick, or picking up objects and throwing them. Enemies are smart enough to move out of the way of incoming heavy objects, so this isn't usually useful until your physical strength has been upgraded a few times. While you might only be able to pick up barrels at the outset, you end up being able to pick up trucks and throw them around. To go the distance in Pacific City you will need to upgrade this ability, because it also indicates how much damage you can take.
On top of regular bullets and brawn, you can use explosives. You start out with grenades, but can also obtain some rocket launchers from your enemies. Taking out enemies with explosives increases the skill, and each upgrade offers more damage and a higher radius. It is a double edged sword - while explosives are great for taking out enemy cars and their passengers, it can also kill nearby civilians, which drops your skill. However, the punishment is minute and won't really impact on your upgrades.
Driving is the one skill that is not necessary; you can play the entire game without getting in a vehicle. This is a good thing, because for the most part, driving sucks. You can commandeer civilian vehicles, but the handling for most of them is very poor. The Agency has three vehicles available to you at the garage; a speedy sports car, a SUV that can handle rugged terrain, and a truck cab that plows through just about anything. There are two ways to improve your driving skills. The first is running over enemies. Without any driving skill this is difficult as most enemies will just avoid you, and it is much more efficient to get out of the car and shoot them instead. The second way to improve your skills is to compete in races, which are against the clock. Again, with poor handling skills these can be a bit troublesome. Once you manage to get a couple of driving skill upgrades, these become much easier. Another perk with the Agency vehicles is that their appearance changes in line with your driving skill, giving your sports car a sleeker look, or beefier tires for your SUV. Once fully upgraded, they get an additional bonus, such as a nitro boost for the truck, and mounted machine guns for the sports car. While these are nifty to play around with for a short period of time, driving as a whole feels completely underutilised in the game. It would have been nice to have a few chases, or even some smart level design which allowed you to take a short cut and launch cars off makeshift ramps into an enemy fortress.
Agility is the defining skill in Crackdown, and goes hand in hand with level design. Agility determines how high you can jump. All three islands have a big degree of verticality. Your agent can cling onto window ledges, balconies, and the edges of buildings, and continue jumping upwards from there. The main way to gain agility is by collecting agility orbs. These are mostly found on rooftops, so you will need to employ your climbing skills. While it is possible to travel the entirety of Pacific City at the start of the game, you certainly won't be able to scale all the buildings, and thus reach some of the fortresses. While it isn't too subtle, it still strikes the effective balance between being open-ended while offering a structured way to progress. It often means doing a bit of island hopping, as you go back to find more orbs, upgrade, then go to another island to get newly accessible ones, and so on. The level design is such that this is a fun endeavour anyway, planning your jumps ahead of time as you try to figure out the best path to the orbs you can see up above. Rooftop races are also available, requiring you to go through checkpoints on the rooftops within a time limit. If you complete the challenge, you are awarded agility points. These aren't necessary to fully upgrade, and I found some of them pretty tedious. Not making a jump often means failure, which is very frustrating for long races. A quick restart feature might have mitigated this to a degree, but if you fail you have to traipse back across the city if you want to try again.
Presentation is excellent, with an intentional comic book feel. People and objects have a distinct black border around them as though they have been pencilled in. By not aiming for realism, they have really nailed a cohesive, colourful look. Most impressive is the draw distance; stand on the tallest buildings, and you will be able to see nearly every other building that would be visible from your position, even on the other side of the map. Moving objects fare worse, with some pop-in if things are getting hectic. However, this mainly occurs when you are intentionally causing having and blowing up everything in the streets; it's rarely an issue while you are following your mission objectives. The game also has an intentionally hammy commentator, who gives you updates, acts as a guide, and lauds your skills. The last part is mildly broken, where he will comment on skills you weren't even using. For example, giving you props for an impressive ascent when you were running along a flat road. I found this amusing, but being told about rooftop races for the umpteenth time, which triggered whenever you came within range of one, became tiresome. There are plenty of other neat touches as well, such as the way your agent grunts with each jump, the way the screen shakes when you hit the ground from a great height, and the way the sound of a homing rocket scales as it gets closer to your location and then whizzes by your head as you manage to avoid it. There are plenty of people bustling around the city, and firefights often break out between gangs and the peacekeepers, making the place feel alive.
The game does offer a challenge on the medium setting, such that I turned it down to Tough (the easiest setting) after some frustrations. The game is balanced as far as requiring a certain skill level to be able to beat the kingpins and their generals. This is mainly by virtue of guards continuing to respawn. If you don't have good aiming skills or armour, you won't be able to take them out fast enough as they get replaced. This can make storming a fortress a tense affair as you retreat to recover your health, and try to progress a little further before you have to fall back again. While your aim is pretty good from a distance, enemies are a better aim the closer they are. Thus it can be frustrating to have a quartet of enemies respawn through a door several feet from you and rip you to shreds in a few seconds before you can find adequate cover. This means restarting from a supply point and needing to clear the fortress from scratch, and was the reason I turned down the difficulty. Aside from that one point of frustration, the game is never unfair. Playing through the game while doing the odd orb-hunting or races will naturally progress your skills (aside from driving) so they should be near their peak when you reach the end of the game. Of course if you are ever having trouble, you can focus on upgrading a particular ability by asaulting gangs in the streets, or just taking your time with outlying enemies of a fortress.
I do not have Xbox Live, and unfortunately my attempts to system link were unsuccessful, and could not find the other linked machine. The game offers co-op and allows two players to run around the city taking on the bosses, but I advise reading other reviews if you want more accurate information of this feature. This review also incorporates the free download which adds the Keys To The City mode. This is like an ultimate cheat mode. Note that this starts you in a new game, not your existing game, and turns off achievements and leaderboards. The cheats are varied, allowing you to set your skills to whatever level you want, have insane agility (jump higher and ran faster than was previously possible), spawn items at will, and more. This makes for a fun diversion, letting you set up a long chain of exploding barrels or cars, and generally just go nuts around the city.
Crackdown is a great action game that makes you feel like a superagent. It is easy to pick up and play, has fun gunplay, and a great city to explore. What are you waiting for agent? Let's see what you can do!