Crackdown

"It is like Crack? Or is it a big Downer?"

Gameplay (Single Player) 10/10
Crackdown has possibly the best gameplay I've seen, I've played the game for hours and hours and I'm still not bored of it yet. There's so much freedom within the game, but the entire freedom is determined by your actions. When you start the game, you begin as a completely undeveloped agent, it's your job to toughen up this agent, in five areas: Agility, Driving, Explosives, Strength and Firearms.

The game decides your skills based on your kills, if you injure a gang member slightly with a gun, but finish him with a grenade you'll get experience in both Firearms and Explosives areas, but more experience for explosives. As the Narrator says "Skills for kills, Agent. Skills for kills".

As you increase these skills, your abilities increase, you can shoot more accurately, run faster and drive with better handling. But by far the best of your gained abilities is jumping, you can jump 30 feet in the air in one single bound, you can jump from rooftop to rooftop to street to wall to rooftop again. This is what grants your freedom, this gives you massive freedom in how you attack each of the gang's Sergeants and Kingpins.

Other parts of the gameplay will have you competing in time trials over land and rooftops to increase your stats (depending on which kind of race you do; agility or driving). There's orb collectiong, again there are 2 kinds of orbs; Agility and 'Secret'.

Gameplay (Online play) 10/10
The gameplay online is like an enhanced version of the single player. You can do all the same things, kill the same people, drive the same cars, climb the same buildings. But there's one thing that changes it all: the other player.

The great thing is that you and this other player are free to do what you like, you can run around killing everything, blowing up everything and generally making a nuisance of yourselves. Or you could wait by the side of a road, throw cars in a ditch until you can't find any more and blow 'em all up with a few well-placed Remote Mines. You can just spend hours messing around, kicking each other off buildings, racing each other and helping each other and the game is a real riot.

Downloadable content (Online Only) 10/10:
With the added downloadable content there is a whole load of new stuff added, vehicles, new skins, new game types and the best: Keys to the city.
Keys to the city allows you to open up a menu in game, letting you spawn various objects such as explosive barrels, the ramp trucks and each of the agency vehicles.

Then there's the new vehicles - a racecar (exceeding the Agency's Original Sports Car in speed hugely), an armoured vehicle (the agency truck but with rocket launchers) and the agency buggy (the SUV with the lack of the jumping ability, and the air control you get is much better).

Graphics: 10/10
The graphics in this game are beautiful. And before I go any further I have to say that the graphics are NOT Cel Shading (they're too detailed).
Anyway, the graphics are brilliant. They're smooth, they're fitting and they work brilliantly. You rarely see the game slow down outside of Xbox Live play, and explosions look amazing.

Sound: 10/10
This game has it's own engine for sound, to make it realistic, sounds literally bounce off walls and react to solid objects moving and each sound has somewhere it comes from, so that it works amazingly realistically.
Music in the game is varied, with Rock, Rap, Hip-Hop and Techno playing on the car's radios. Explosions and guns sound plenty meaty, so all in all it's brilliant to listen to.

Best of all though, is the Narrator's voice, the way he shouts "I love the smell of Agent in the morning!" when you're on fire, or how he tells you that what you're looking at is the best view in the city when you're staring at the dead body of a prostitute. Or even when he yells at you: "Is this your idea of a joke?" when you fall off the 2nd tallest building the game game while trying to defeat "The enigmatic Wang".

Achievements: 10/10
This game has a whole host of achievements for you to get, from the average beating the game, to some of the most creative things you'd expect. A particularly good (and imaginative) one is to climb to the top of the Agency Tower (the tallest building in the game), and another is to jump off it and survive (by landing either in the ocean or in a very, very small pond). Others include maximising your skills, doing certain things in 60 seconds (ie: execute 6 stunts in a minute).

With the downloadable content a further pile of points were added (bringing the total up to 1250) to be earned, adding more interesting achievements like attaching several bodies to a vehicle using the harpoon gun. Once again showing how imaginitive the game is and how much time the developers took on it.

Overall: 9/10
I definitely reccomend buying this brilliant game, it's unconventional player abilities, it's unprecedented freedom. This game is seriously more fun than a bathtub of jelly, with piles of toys in it, on a large, inflatable, rubber castle. Though it does reach a state where there's little left to do unless you go online with friends.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 06/06/07