Crackdown

More of the Same, Only Less of it

HIGH It's good to hear the voice of the announcer again.

LOW An astonishing lack of variety and absurd amounts of repetition.

WTF Why was this not released as $15 DLC?

Game Description: The sequel to the award-winning vertical-world adventure, Crackdown 2 is the ultimate open-ended world action experience, only available on Xbox 360. The game lets you be judge, jury, and executioner for a huge, fully explorable city. Crackdown 2 takes multiplayer gaming to unprecedented levels for the ultimate co-op and competitive multiplayer experience, providing you and your friends with the complete freedom to explore, destroy, and play your way as you restore justice and peace to Pacific City—by any means necessary.

Although I wasn't the biggest fan of the original Crackdown, I did see a lot of potential in the title and I've definitely been looking forward to the announced sequel. However, the recently-announced news that there will be no playable female agents was incredibly disappointing to me.

Dan says that Crackdown isn't an unmitigated disaster—I disagree. For a game that received crazy amounts of hype prior to release and was even granted the coveted honor of being host to the Halo 3 beta, it's an embarrassing, incomplete, and hopelessly botched attempt by a developer that either has no idea what they're doing, or lacked the time, talent, and/or resources to bring their concept to fruition.

In my review of Mercenaries, I wondered if it wasn't time to drop the plots entirely from open-concept action games. Let the player run around with a gun, going nuts. I'll be the first to admit that it was a terrible idea. In my defense, though, it was meant as an ironic comment about the poor quality of videogame stories, not an honest call for their removal. Realtime Worlds seems to have run with the concept, though, and the result, while entertaining for a little while, is for the most part an awkward, incomplete mess.

Game Description: Crackdown pushes the action-driving hybrid genre into the next generation with the first ever truly 3D playground. Gamers will enforce justice by any means necessary in Pacific City, a crime-ridden urban center built to encourage the exploration of the full width, depth and height of the city. Coupled with highly innovative co-op gameplay—a genre first—and an interactive world where nearly anything can be used as a weapon, gamers will be able to create a volatile cocktail of judicial oppression as they clean up the streets.