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Full Access - Hands on Preview.
Crackdown is a futuristic free roaming action title with RPG elements and is born from the creative mind of the original GTA and Lemmings creator Dave Jones and his team at Real Time Worlds.
Crackdown takes place in Pacific City, a city which resembles in parts a mixture of San Francisco, New York and even Los Angeles. Pacific City is in turmoil and under siege by three well organised and heavily-armed dominant criminal organisations who are each attempting to control the criminal activities within the city. Each of these gangs have a specific nature of business which they participate in and a King Pin. The Los Muertos have Don Domingo Garcia and deal in Drugs, the Volk have Vladmir Golyak and deal in organised crime whilst the Shai-Gen Corporation is a sinister and pervasive force of evil lead by Zuang Lun Wang. Each gang features 6 bosses and 1 kingpin and although it is completely optional it is recommended you take down the bosses before the kingpin as the kingpin will call in their remaining bosses and gang members as backup and in order to protect themselves from your attack. What is more, each boss has a certain role within the organisation and so taking out one boss whose job it is to provide strength training to the gang members for example means that the gang members will be weaker in melee combat making your job just a little bit easier.
Players assume the role of a cloned superhuman cop and part an elite crime unit setup to bring the Pacific City streets back under lawful control called The Agency. As a member of the Agency you will rely not only on intelligence and gang dossiers provided by the agency but also on your own abilities and skills which you will need to develop in order to progress and access areas of the city. You are able to choose from 1 of 8 available character appearance settings but there are no further options available to customise your character beyond this either in the menu or in game although each time you play you can select a different appearance if required. As players level up skills namely strength, then the character appearance changes also.
Crackdown uses a core, five-way skill system for you to develop your character and their abilities; you have Strength, Firearms, Driving, Explosives and Agility. All of these skills are developed as you play through the game by carrying out any of the specific activities so for example the more driving or the more shooting you do the more your develop your Driving or Firearms skills accordingly. The only exception to this method of increasing your characters abilities is the Agility skill which you also develop by collecting orbs which there are a total of 500 located throughout the city.
Developing your skills is essential in order to progress, for example developing your characters Agility will enable you to reach previously inaccessible areas of Pacific City such as higher and less accessible rooftops. The vast majority of Pacific City is also destructible and by developing your characters strength not only does your characters appearance alter you will also be able to pick up and use heavier and heavier objects such as cars, trucks, barrels, lamp posts steel girders or just about anything else you care to try, you can then either for just the shear hell of toss them around or use them as a method of attack the choice is yours.
Exploration of the city although very large in size with plenty to explore both on the ground and the rooftops unlike games of a similar genre such as for example Saints Row offers very little reward where as exploration in Saints Row unlocked the opportunity to compete in the various activities, missions and discovery one of the many hidden tagging and bonus CD locations whereas Crackdown does seem rather limited and with essentially only the supply points, orbs, bosses and kingpins ultimately necessary to discover for me it did become almost a chore and I never really felt rewarded for exploring. As you explore you will discover not only the various supply points, gang bosses and kingpin locations but also orbs (collect these to improve your Agility) and races (on foot and in vehicle) but beyond these there seems little on no reason to explore any further and often trekking around and around simply to find ways of reaching rooftops of specific buildings whether it be to gain access to a gang boss, supply point, roof top race or even collect an agility orb it can become rather tiresome, repetitive and lacks any real variation.
Supply points which are located throughout the city are initially under control of the gangs, you will need to discover the locations of them all and regain control of them for the Agency. Once you regain control of the supply points you can then use them as a method of quick transportation around the city and also a place to store weapons and replenish your ammo. You are also able to use the supply points for dropping off Gang Weapons, naturally the Agency have a selection of weapons which are available to you but often you will find that gang members will be using a weapon not available to the Agency and in this situation that after killing the gang member you can simply pick up the weapon and return it to any of the agency controlled supply points where it will then become part of the agencies available weaponry for you to select and use if required.
The targeting system does allow you lock on to a target either a enemy or vehicle and use the right analogue stick to select specific locations, for example if you lock on to an enemy gang member you can flick the right thumb stick to select either his arms, legs, chest or head and with vehicles you can target either the vehicles body or wheels although the targeting system can sometimes function not as intended and from time to time you may lock on to either dead people or find that the accuracy is not as expected. In most cases you have to actually put the reticule over the target first before locking on to guarantee the lock on you desire. You can also use a hand to hand combat system although this is a little limited and not much more than approaching your opponent and simply bashing the B button in order to kick them and no further options available for say punching or combo attacks.
Crackdown does use rather a unique Cel-Shaded graphical style mixed with a more natural and traditional style, it really is quite a unique presentation and blend of the styles works very well. Once underway there is never any sign of any pop up or loading screens and you are free to roam the city as you see fit including up on the rooftops where you are able to admire the city for as far as the eye can see which is a long way as the draw distance is excellent. The whole roof jumping is handled very well as there is certainly a good sense of scale as you reach the upper regions of the city. It certainly makes a big difference in terms of how the game is played compared to grabbing one of the vehicles and driving around at ground zero.
Overall Crackdown is very enjoyable but personally I was expecting much more especially considering the heritage of the game’s lead designer. My main niggles are the lack of reason or reward to explore the city environment and also the map which has no waypoint marker system so I found I was continually pressing the back button and checking the map to get to my desired destination. The combat system is very basic and could have been a little tighter but works for what it is. The driving is fairly fast with handling that is of an arcade like flavour, so no issues there really. In general Crackdown really feels like a bare bones game that could do with some more things to do making for a more in depth experience. Perhaps some new stuff will have been added since this preview code but I doubt it very much if the recent marketplace demo is anything to go by. I think a lot of weight has been placed on the co-op part of the game which is only going to be available to those with Xbox Live or multiple Xbox 360’s (and copies of the game). The co-op will no doubt add much needed longevity to the game as players can plan attacks on the Kingpins and Bosses and perhaps tackle the hardest difficulty together but quintessentially the game play remains the same as playing on your own. When a game relies on players to make up their own game play you do begin to wonder if it could have used a few more months of development time to add some cohesion to proceedings. Either Way, Crackdown does have its moments and we shall have to wait and see if the final game addresses some of these niggling issues with its general direction.
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