Crackdown is a like the most beautiful one trick pony you've ever seen!
Essentially you play a super powered cop who is able to jump, throw, kick, shoot and drive his way around a sand box city to rid it of three evil crime gangs.
The city itself is beautifully rendered with some really cool locations, the feeling of height at the top of some of the skyscrapers is genuine and jumping off them actually gets my fear of heights going making my stomach turn over.
As said before you job is to overthrow three gangland kingpins, one Hispanic, one Russian and one Oriental and you do this by killing their gang bosses which effectively denies the ganglord different resources be it guns, recruits, weapons, intel etc. The problems arise in that all you do is travel somewhere and kill lots of gang-members eventually getting to the gang bosses and killing them. Death is not permanent so if you don't succeed you just re-spawn and try again.
Your powers as you play the game increase RPG like, in fact the system is a lot like that in Fable 2 but the orbs are sucked up automatically. To improve your agility you have to collect green orbs these enable you to increase your level and jump higher and further. Shooting people from heights also helps to increase this and your fire-power level. Your strength level is increased mainly by kicking bad guys. Driving level from running people over, doing stunts and completing races. Etc.
There are cars in the game, lots of them you have three agency specific cars that morph into better vehicles when your abilities increase. You have sports car, SUV and Truck Cab.
There are also plenty of cars being driven around from tuned racers to coaches to soviet style missile launchers, the only think really missing is a tank or two. However, for all of the vehicles around once you can leap and jump your way around the cities the cars take a huge back seat and I found myself only wanting to drive for the sake of the achievement of maxing all my skills.
Shooting is a large part of the game and you'll do a lot of shooting from distance so it's a shame that the two sniper riffles available don't have zooms on them. However, the draw distance and auto aiming is such that you can target someone fairly far away and kill them it's quite impressive to do and because the close combat is fiddly you'll find yourself in lots of long range fire fights. Especially when you get the lock on target seeking missile launcher!
Graphically it's very well implemented and I noticed only two glitches in the whole game, the worst being explosions travelling through solid floors. The sound is cool as well and you get different tracks to play when driving around.
The game is great fun to play but the single minded game mechanic becomes tiresome towards the end and you long for some other type of game aspect rather than jumping around the roof tops shooting gang members.
Then the end comes and it's a bit of a let down and you're left in a city with no bad guys to kill by a super powered killing machine!! Although I admit these can be reset.
It reminds me a lot of Just Cause, but Just Cause has this game beat in several areas, not just the parachute, flying and boats that this game doesn't have.
Overall not bad for a first attempt and worthy of it's 7.5 score but you have to expect so much more from the second game.