Crackdown (2007)

I am on a journey to beat 360 random Xbox 360 games. Here's my next adventure

Game number 60 was Crackdown. This is a 3rd person shooter where you play as a cop who is trying to take down 3 gangs who have taken over the city. It is set in a futuristic world where humans have many body enhancements and essentially have super powers.

Graphics/Sound: I thought the graphics were awful in Crackdown. It felt like they were going for a comic book/animated art style, but the game was extremely low poly and felt like it was missing textures. I am not usually a stickler for graphics, but this looks like an original xbox game. The sound effects and music were pretty cool though. I enjoyed hearing all the people talking and the music was pretty good. It makes up for the poor graphics.

Story: The story is essentially non-existent. You are a cop who has these body enhancements and needs to take down 3 gangs who have taken over Pacific City. You go to each of these areas and take down the gang leaders. That’s really all you get. Each of the gangs and the gang members have bios that flesh out the world, but there really isn’t anything else to go off of.

Gameplay: The gameplay is the bread and butter of Crackdown. You spend most of your time in 3rd person shooter combat and it is excellent. This is not a cover shooter. It feels more like an action game in that you need to run (or jump) away and around buildings. The shooting is pretty good here… but that is not the way I made my build! I found kicking to be the most effective way to win! I was fast enough to sprint in, kick people to death, and then sprint out to not die.

Each of your skills can be leveled up in some VERY light rpg mechanics. These skills are strength, shooting, driving, explosives, and agility. Most of these are pretty self explanatory to get exp in. Killing people with guns, explosives, or kicks give exp in shooting, explosives, and strength respectively. You need to win races through rings (like superman 64) to level up driving… which sucks. Finally, you need to find collectable tokens throughout the world to level up agility. Now, leveling up agility sounds like it sucks, but it was actually my favorite part of the game. When you level it up you get to jump really high and sprint super fast! I genuinely enjoyed finding paths to the top of the many buildings in Crackdown in order to find agility tokens and level it up. Movement feels sooooooo good in this game. You have to play it to understand!

My experience: Crackdown felt like something from before the Xbox 360 era. The team who made it disregarded the story and just wanted to make a game that was fun to play. I don’t think there are very many games without “Spider-man” in the title that have more fun movement than Crackdown. The gunplay was fine and the missions were acceptable. I enjoyed that some of the buildings had secret ways to enter and could vastly shorten the mission. It's cool when things like that exist! I had a great time here and it was great, mindless fun!

Overall, Crackdown was a blast to play! It's a pretty short game, but it is nothing but fun! You will not get a groundbreaking cinematic experience or any story at all, but I can almost guarantee that you will have fun! Turn off your brain for 5 hours and play this! I can recommend to anyone who likes 3rd person shooters. (7/10)

I spent 6 hours, 1 minutes, and 30 seconds playing Crackdown.

I have spent a total of 786 hours and 28 minutes on the Road To 360 challenge so far.

Next Game: Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

Gameplay is great on the lowest difficulty, anything higher and the concept of being a super-powered agent is undermined by bullet-sponge enemies who never miss a shot.

While the narrative is light, I couldn't help but notice that each of the gangs you crack down on are stereotypes of immigrants (Latino, Eastern European and Asian). This is sort of redeemed by the twist ending, but it's definitely a set-up that would be considered questionable by today's standards.

Overall, super fun and engaging, a very 'gamey'-game which evolved the style of crazy over the top sandbox action beyond the relative 'realism' of the GTA series.