Released on 23/02/2007

• Crackdown Preview

  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.

  Plummeting around at your leisure and wreaking sweet havoc-slanted justice on the criminal underbelly of Pacific City.

  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

  Published: 15/02/2007

• Crackdown 2 developers hard at work again

  Crackdown 2 developers hard at work again

  Remember Ruffian Games, the Dundee-based developer of the brilliant Xbox 360 exclusive Crackdown 2? What with the game's barnstorming release last summer, the team has been a bit quiet of late, but now they've just announced they're hard at work on new games. Yep, games plural.

  According to a blog post - thanks, Eurogamer - the developer said it's cracking on - sorry - with two new games, and it describes them as "high action, visceral titles," that are "heavily focused on online."

  "Rather boringly as is the case for most nascent projects we're unable to talk about them in any detail right now," apologises studio head Gaz Liddon, before signing off.

  Let the speculation begin! Crackdown 2 was a huge hit, which suggests that there's a good possibility that one of those new games would be Crackdown 3. The series, which casts you as an acrobatic agent mopping up crime in a futuristic city is both high action and visceral, and with four-player co-op in the last game, it would be great to see a further emphasis on online play.

  Maybe there's a new Crackdown on the way, and maybe there isn't, then. As for the second game, however, we can only wait and see.

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