Master Chief aside, can Crackdown cut it?

Poor old Crackdown is going to suffer some unfair assumptions before people have even played it. For starters – and let’s not beat around the bush here – plenty will, somewhat understandably, look at it as ‘the game which comes free with the Halo 3 Beta’, such is the Master Chief’s iconic status. On top of that, the whole sprawling urban environment, gun-toting, car-jacking, mission-taking gameplay will beget comparisons to Rockstar’s genre-defining Grand Theft Auto games, of which the fourth edition is due in October. Poor, over-pitched Crackdown.

Or: Happy, confident Crackdown. You see, despite sitting on the shoulders of such recognised gaming giants, the view from Crackdown’s perch is surprisingly rosy. Not content with by-the-numbers action or selling on a gimmick, Real Time Worlds' debut 360 offering has fun with the GTA formula in an explosive, unique, tongue-in-cheek way that embodies emergent pick-up-and-play fun. Crackdown could not only meet the Halo hype head-on, then, but may actually stand proudly on its own merits at the same time.

A unique visual style

It certainly justifies the vaunted ‘next-gen’ tag as far as visuals go. Indeed, the vistas offered up by Crackdown’s powerful engine combine with a unique visual style – it’s sort-of Cel shading, but not really – bold primary colours, and an almost limitless draw distance that really do imbue a breathless ‘go-anywhere, do-anything’ feel.

Unusually for this type of game, however, Crackdown would appear to deliver on much of this promise. Where GTA and its ilk revolve largely around horizontal streetwide exploration, Crackdown boasts a heavy emphasis on scaling the landscape in the vertical plain too; so you’ll be finding routes up to the highest points by venturing along stairwells, shimmying along ledges and even leaping from rooftop to rooftop in true free-form fashion.

Yes, that’s right; leaping along rooftops. In fact, you can jump gigantic distances in Crackdown. Actually, that’s putting it mildly – to say you can leap tall buildings in a single bound would not be at all outlandish. In Crackdown, you see, you play a cop – or rather, a legion of bio-engineered super cops with Incredible Hulk style abilities, bred for the single-minded purpose of eliminating threats to the gameworld’s safety by… well, plummeting around at your leisure and wreaking sweet havoc-slanted justice on the criminal underbelly of Pacific City.

Helping you in this task is the experience system, which sees your character level-up their stats based on how you play the game. So, running and leaping everywhere and collecting the precious hard-to-reach agility orb pickups in the process is going to do their jump and speed stats a great help, while picking up and throwing objects, battering enemies hand to hand, or shooting them to high heaven will develop strength and accuracy as a result.

Ludicrously over-the-top selection

Of course, it’s beneficial to action-hungry players that Crackdown boasts a large and ludicrously over-the-top selection of guns, grenades, rocket launchers, cars, trucks and general myriad metallic means to unleash quasi-cartoon fury on all they survey. A neat over-the-shoulder lock-on targeting system that’s far superior to any of GTA’s efforts renders it all very fun to use, and a good balance of un-marshalled exploration, on-map objectives and side missions – such as race missions dotted liberally throughout Pacific – create variety and balance that makes progress immediately rewarding.

At least, that’s the impression from the Demo currently available on Xbox Live. It’s playable both offline and in co-operative over Xbox Live, allowing a friend to leap into your city – or you into theirs – for double the carnage and explosions aplenty, and this mode looks likely to be a big selling point of the final release. Indeed, this is possibly the way the free-roaming genre should always have been done; fast, free-form, fun and eccentric , Crackdown’s own idiosyncratic approach to the action/driving hybrid is looking every bit as exceptional as it was unexpected.

Preview by: Mark Scott
Preview Published: 15.02.07