CrackDown Review

Sometime after the release of Grand Theft Auto III, the popular term used in the game industry to describe open-world, mission-based games became "sandbox." It's kind of a dopey term, but it makes sense and properly conveys the sense of freedom that these games tend to have. But even with the freedom offered by this style of game, most of them tend to have a pretty rigid structure for you to follow if you want to see the game through to its storyline conclusion. Crackdown, from Microsoft and Real Time Worlds, tends to get away from that aspect. The result is an open-world game that feels more open ended than any other game of its type, but that lack of structure makes the game feel half finished and shallow in a few spots.
There's a bit of backstory to the action in Crackdown, but all you really need to know is that you're a new type of supercop that can evolve very quickly, which means your skills improve as you play. You're out to clean up the streets. There are three gangs, each with seven leaders. You can take on any gang leader at any time, but there's a logical order laid out for you that makes the progression scale as your skills increase. There isn't much difference between each individual gang leader--you just need to get to where that gang head is by either working your way through, around, or over the gangsters that surround the leader, then open fire on the boss and take him or her down. Once you eliminate all seven leaders of a gang, a "final crime" occurs, which is really just a mess of street soldiers wandering around in one specific area. When you take all of them out, the gang is vanquished and you'll no longer run into any resistance in that part of the city. Once you've repeated this process through all three parts of the city, you're done cleaning up the city. It's got an abrupt and disappointing conclusion, overall. But before you can have a plot twist, you have to have a plot, and Crackdown has neither.
The weird part is that none of the story really matters, because the whole point of the game is to provide open-ended freedom and a large, interesting city to explore. And on the gameplay side, Crackdown works. The city might not seem huge when you first start moving around, but that's more because you're not thinking vertically. As a man with superhuman abilities, you'll get stronger, faster, and more powerful as you play. The plainest representation of this is your agility rating, which you increase by collecting orbs that are hidden around the city on rooftops. As your agility increases, you can jump higher. So what initially seems like a high, but unimpressive, jump at the beginning turns to your agent flinging himself through the air, from one rooftop to the next, or scaling buildings by clinging to window ledges and jumping up the side. The range of movement you get once your agility is up is really impressive and makes moving around the world a lot of fun. Also, firing from the rooftops or jumping in on your enemies from above is a great way to clean up the opposing gangs, so it's got tactical considerations, as well.
Overall Crackdown offers a fun but often limited experience, with such a short life span its a shame that the developers didnt focus more on the games back story and varyed the gameplay a bit more.
CGM score 3/5