Crackdown

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Amazon.com Sales Rank: 690

Average Customer Rating:

UPC: 882224260596

List price: ~~$29.99~~

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This wouldn't be a bad game ten years ago, December 27, 2008

Okay. This was just a nightmare of a gaming experience. Just, unbeliavably terrible. Just downright horrible. To be completely honest, this wouldn't be a bad game for ten years ago. Or maybe for 2001 or 2002, as a late N64 or PS1 title. But considering this game is pretty recent,it's downright inexcusable. So why is this game so bad. Well, to sum it up, it's EXTREMELY hard, to the point of frustrating. Not to mention randomly spawning enemies. That's right. Randomly Spawning Enemies, like the kind you'd find in a Nintendo Mega Man game where as soon as you take your camera view off the screen, more enemies show up. And what reward do you get for killing off all the enemies in the vincinity? Why, even MORE enemies! "A hit squad has been dispatched to take you out." Add this on top of a game that has really no direction, no storyline, or even point to it, and there's not even any reason to play it. It ain't fun, by any definition of the word.

Basically, you're a genetically made SuperSoldier who is created by "The Agency," all of the nation's law enforcement combined into one agency, and you're told by some annoying old disembodied Commander voice -who also serves as the game's narrator and the only actual "character" in the entire game- to wipe out three criminal empires. And off you go shooting, to kill literally hundreds of thousands of enemies by the time you finish the game, if you can even bare it that long. ALL you do in this game is basically kill bad guys and jump from rooftops, and while the latter may sound fun in a Spider-Man sort of way, it really isn't. At least Spider-Man has webbing to control where he wants to go. You know, flying would be a whole lot simplier. And easier. Oh yeah. The game also has some very poorly conceived races. Either a rooftop race, which are usually extremely hard to beat in time, or some insanely stupid driving race, which if trying to drive isn't hard enough for you, trying to complete a Time Trials race in the wrong lane will surely push you over the edge.

When you start, all of your skills - Agility for leaping, Driving for absolutely nothing, Explosives for bombing, Strength mostly just for health, and Firearms for shooting- are all poor and barely usable. And after you've leveled up all of them as you go along in the game, well... they're still extremely poor. The only thing that increases is the leaping ability, in which you can go from 10 to 30 feet in leaping height. The sprinting speed sure don't increase like they say it does, that's for sure.

Driving, is more or less, utterly pointless in this game. 95% of the time, you'll never be in a car! Which is good for two reasons because, for one, Driving controls are really really retarded. Both in setup and manuevering. That's how bad it is. Bad in the "it's almost impossible to not run into civilians" sort of way, even when your driving skill is near maxed out. Why they would even bother with a Driving skill, when the only time you'll ever even drive is to either do the stupid races, or mainly, to travel really far distances on the islands, is beyond me. But the other reason you won't be in a car much, is not to hear the insansely bad soundtrack for the game. According to the in-game "Jukebox," there are over 100 songs in this game, and all of them are really bad, third party techno tracks. Like the soundtrack came out of the skeeziest clubs in Europe. The game IS partially European, at least, which is why things are referred to in the game as a "centre" or a "lift." It's odd considering that the game takes place in the near-future West Coast America and that other things like measurements (pounds, height in feet and inches, miles per hour) are North American standard, and not Metric. Anyway, the soundtrack is really European, really Techno, and really, really bad. Maybe they figured Techno music is "futuristic?" It doesn't matter anyway, because they could've saved some money by not getting all of these crap songs (which you can't cut off, by the way) for the car that you'll rarely be using, anyway. At least it's nice that the car tells you how many miles per hour you're driving, though, as you accidently plow into an idiot civilian.

Strength is another almost utterly useless attribute. It's only effectiveness is raising your health. But to level it up, you'll have to beat down on enemies using melee attacks, which is even more rarely used than a vehicle. 99.9% of the game is shooting, and you can only really raise your strength (health) by whacking an enemy with a gun, or kicking them, which does very little damage to them, anyway. You see, some of your skills are raised per usage. Meaning, the more you shoot, the more you blow stuff up, and the more you win races, the higher your stats will go, with 400 points being the maximum effectiveness level (even though the bar will continue to go up to 500.) But you'll almost never kick or hit an enemy, so raising this stat is pretty annoying.

The other way you raise stats is by collecting a bunch of stupid orbs. Literally hundreds of orbs, scattered across literally every rooftop in the game, is how you increase your Agility. You don't have to collect all 500 of them to max out your Agility though, because of the rooftop races (although you really won't win those much) and the blue, "Hidden orbs" which increase a little of every stat. In fact, those were the only way I was able to get Driving and Strength skills up. The driving is bad, no matter what, though, and the Strength, although lets you lift and carry objects weighing tons, is only useful for health. I had about 300/500 Agility orbs and 100/300 Hidden orbs, by the time I finished the game, and only Driving was lower than Level 2 (300 to 399 points).

The shooting in this game, though, is severely flawed. And not because of the weak Firearms skills and weak firearms in the game. But by the Auto-Aim targeting being severely broken. I swear, this auto-aiming NEVER EVER EVER works the way you want it to. It sems to target only the most furthest enemies, or moving non-enemies first, and ONLY focuses on the guy right in your face when there's absolutely nothing left to kill. While the game does give you manual shooting as well, it's pretty hard to kill anything that's not close up to you with it. But the broken aiming and an invisible enemy grenade that you'll never even see until you're already dead are the two biggest things that'll kill you the most with this game. And unless you really get into this crapfest of a game, you will die hundreds upon hundreds of times. I only had it on normal difficulity, and I died like 30 times within any given hour.

All the guns are pretty weak, and when I found it, about late into the first gang and location, I wound up using the Harrington HMG 90 rifle throughout the remainder of the game. You only get two weapons to hold at a time throughout the entire game, by the way. The problem with all of the serious firearms is that they're power is compensated by an extremely low clip or insanely slow reload times, with the Harrington being the slowest. I counted the reload time of this thing. Six seconds. Now picture that. In the heat of warfare, having to spend SIX whole seconds just to reload the low clip on this stupid gun! Count to six and that's how much time you're waiting inbetween fire. In six seconds, you could lose all your armor and health and straight die while waiting for this thing to reload. And yes, being you only have two guns and some grenades throughout this whole game, I tried the Call of Duty style "switch to your other gun as you run out of ammo instead of reloading" tactic, only for that to not work as the stupid generic character you're using automatically reloads the gun when you run low or run out, so in order for the Call of Duty trick to work, I'd have to watch and make sure I don't go below ten bullets left and THEN, switch to the other gun in order for it to work, as the character's auto-reloading is completely and totally un-interruptable. SO annoying! WHY should a player have to endure crap like this? Throughout the whole game, I either used the Harrington despite it's insanely slow reload and some kind of rocket or grenade launcher, as anything else would be ineffective, have too small of a clip, hold too little of maximum ammo, or simply be just too weak. Sounds fun, doesn't it?

The "characters" in this game aren't even characters. There's you, the generic, namelss "agent." (Maybe "Agent" is your actual name. I don't know.) There's the disembodied commander narrator/boss guy, who'll remark such sayings as, "Go like the wind, agent!" and "Simply pathetic." when you die. Having the game insult you every time you die, and dying because of some stupid glitch or flaw, is enough to make you want to break the game disc into tiny, little pieces. The "bad guys" are perhaps the most generic looking criminal bosses ever. It's like they looked in an LA phone book to get names for the Spanish lieutenants. There are three "gangs" that rule the city, but they're more like criminal empires because street gangs don't have that many soldiers and they don't actually run entire sectors of a city and it's inhabitants. They are "Los Muertos" or "The Dead" (pretty clever, eh?), The Volk, and Shai Gen. Or... "Generic Spanish gang," "Generic Russian gang," and "Generic Chinese Corporation gang."

The key members of the gang, like I said, are about as generic-looking as generic can get and when you actually find out where they're located and kill the hundreds of bad guys guarding them before you realize that they keep randomally spawning and that you should ignore them and just run towards the main gang lieutenant and kill them, you'll be rewarded with nothing, in the guise of a slightly higher ratio for success. You see, the game developers thought that it'd be clever to make fighting the main gang leader virtually impossible and that you would have more "fun" by taking out key lieutenants, who each enhance the criminal empire, be it by firearms, number of soldiers available, vehicles, etc., so that it becomes slightly easier to take out the main gang leader. But even WHEN you kill everyone else and save him for last, it's STILL virtually impossible, between the miles long approach to their headquarters, the endless spawning soldiers, and the enemy's eight life bars. Like most strongholds in the game, you're best to just run past everyone, trying to survive, and just go all out on the major gang leader before all the minions kill you. Screw "weaking their health" or "minimizing their recruits" with killing the lieutenants, because they won't do much help for you, regardless. But then, I guess, the game would be too short. In this case though, that'd be a good thing.

I should also bring up that the map is even messed up. Yes, that's right! Even the MAP is a pain in the donkey. Not only is the map horribly out-of-scale with everything else, and not only does the map not provide you with any GPS or waypoint marking, but you CAN'T EVEN ZOOM IT IN! The map on the menu screen is just a tiny little map on the menu screen. You can't zoom it in to see closer, or anything. And the arrow representing you on the map takes up an entire city block in reality, meaning things that you may think are close by may be two blocks away from you! How often is it that you can say that the map in a video game is one of it's many, many flaws? Okay, so you can't zoom in, use a GPS, or even accurately know where you're at. Surely, the HUD "radar" map must be better, right? Nope. The biggest problem is, unlike ANY other game that uses an on-screen map, there's no "N" for "North." Just four arrows, any one of them could possibly be north. There's a reason why they don't put the "S"outh, "E"ast, and "W"est on these, and this is why. YOU NEVER KNOW WHERE YOU'RE GOING! I can't tell you how many times I had to pause the game just to figure out which way was North. I often had to look one direction, pause to see the full map to see where I'm facing on it, and then, turn again until I got to facing North or where ever it is I had to go. How could they not have even gotten this right? It also would've been helpful if, being you spend most the game on the roof, to know which enemies were eye-to-eye level with me, above me, or below me. Usually, they make all things above you an arrow facing up on these game maps, and all things below facing down. But, oh no, not in this game! I died so many times because I couldn't tell if any enemy gang were shooting from above, from below, or from so far away, they wouldn't even show up in the compass map screen. Every single enemy is just a dot. Even if they're above me or below me. It's things like this that make you appreciate the little things in any given Grand Theft Auto title, where you don't have to try to figure out where North is, and that the arrows or triangles let you know right away which altitude an enemy is at. But not in this game! In fact, I've seen an effective map system in about EVERY Xbox 360 game that uses one, EXCEPT this game! Oh, and you can't even zoom the map in. Ins't that just something else?

When you die, you have to restart from a "supply station," most of which are few are isolated between locations, and all of them have to be found and unlocked. Oh, and they're ALL on roofs, meaning you have to spend ten minutes climbing up top to them, and you could die just trying to get down from them! An elevator that you can use once you get up to the top the first time would've been nice. I mean, they actually HAVE them in the game and all, so it's not like they would've had to make one from scratch or anything. Any good gun you collect from an enemy HAS to be taken to this supply center/save point in order for you to keep it, or else, you'll lose everything you collected once you die. Sometimes, because of the random enemy pop ups, you'll, ironically, die trying to get back to your save point in order to save the guns you just got in case you die. You could be at any given rooftop, look one way, then look back and have a hoarde of random enemies pop up at you. Sometimes, you can even see them materialize in front of you. Sometimes, you'll restart at a save point and by chance, there'll be a ton of enemies right in front of your face as you just come back from the dead. I don't know. Maybe killing so many enemies as if they were an ant colony and jumping from rooftops sounds fun, but it's really not. Neither is dying a thousand times due to a broken aiming system or enemy grenade. You can still die by gravity, by the way, so with each roof, you still have to be very careful.

The only good thing I can say about the game is that there's no glitches. Oh, wait. There are! Like, constantly getting stuck in a wall, or a rampway, or even the ground! Stuck as in, "this solid object isn't all that solid" stuck. And the random enemies. That counts, too. It's bad enough that once you kill every enemy in the near area, the game will have a "hit squad" of about ten cars come up and bring MORE enemies to you, but to have the ones you JUST KILLED re-materialize right in front of you is just insulting. Like, why even bother to kill them if it just makes more come to kill you, and the dead ones simply return back like it's nothing? Your character is a genetic clone and "The Agency" can make an endless supply of you in case you die. What's their excuse, though?

Overall, this kind of pointless 3D "shoot and jump" kind of simplistic game wouldn't have been so bad on the N64, the original Playstation, or even as an early Gamecube title. I mean, the comic-book like art style isn't anything impressive or new or advanced. 1999 to 2002, this game might've been acceptable. An "average" game, at best. But this kind of simple, pointless, storyline-less, linear "shoot and kill just for the sake of it" game is far below what today's standards are in gaming. To imagine that this is an Xbox 360 title makes me think that this game probably spent so many years in development, that it's heavily outdated by today's standards. When you can't even tell which way is North on your compass map, you can't even zoom in your menu-guide map, and every single character is as generic as a white and black-text can of government corn, it really isn't a game ready to be released. At least not in any year past 2003, on any system greater than maybe Gamecube. This game is bad for simply being simple and outdated and just, really frustrating and lame and incomplete. I can't give this game a One because other than the "getting stuck" and "targeting," there really aren't any glitches or bugs in it. The game is somewhat playable.

However, when a game makes you want to break something in it's incompleteness, or lose your mind and curse after getting killed by some stupid game flaw for the 219th time, something ain't right. I can't imagine anyone over twelve enjoying this game, not to insult anyone under thirteen, but only a simple minded person could enjoy a game this simple and generic. By the cover and art style, the game looks kind of cool. You sort of think "Gears Of War" combined with "Saint's Row." You get to use some high tech equipment to take down three ethnic gangs crippling the city. Sounds fun. And I'm sure, most people who bought this game bought it for the Halo 3 beta, but also because it looked or sounded like fun, right? However, I haven't played a game THIS bad since "Sonic Heroes." (and I would include every other Sonic game since then, had I actually played those also-poorly-rated titles) This is a game you simply want to break with your bare hands, or sell to any gaming store, even if you can only get $2.95 for it. Shoot, ANY amount of money the guy offers you at a game store, you'll take just to not have this horrible curse of a game in your life anymore. I can't say it's a Legend in the "Worst Games Of All Time" ranking, but it's definitely one of those games you'll get rid of, by any means possible, just to not have in your collection. It's like the DVD of "Gigli" or "I Know Who Killed Me" in your DVD collection that makes everything else you own, as well as yourself, look bad just by it's mere prescence, so you get rid of it, possibly erase all save files of it from your memory card or hard drive too, and pretend like it never happened. Yes, this game is a "pretend like it never happened" kind of game.

AVOID this disaster at all costs! It's not fun, it's frustrating, and it's not even in-depth.

Addictive gameplay, December 14, 2008

Crackdown is a very simple, yet addictive game. It is easy to pick up and play when you don't have a lot of time to dedicate to a more complex or story rich game. I would liken Crackdown to Grand Theft Auto, with only one mission, kill the gang bosses and their men. Simple, straightforward, fun and addictive. A must buy.

GTA from the Other Side, November 16, 2008

Crackdown is sort of like GTA in that you run around a large city fighting gangsters, stealing cars, generally causing mayhem, and dying with minimal consequences. Except instead of being an up-and-coming criminal, you're a genetically modified and cybernetically enhanced super-cop tasked with cleaning up the city. Your skills improve as you locate hidden power-ups, kill enemies, jump vehicles, and complete races. Plot is kept to a bare minimum of "go there, kill that guy".

Despite this simplicity, the game is quite fun: Jumping from roof to roof, leaping up the side of buildings, taking on gang hit-squads like a one-man army, and blowing up basically everything. Personally, I thought the driving mechanics were lame, but I'm not a big fan of racing games in general so your experience may vary, plus that part of the game can largely be ignored. Jumping from roof to roof is much more fun than driving down the road, anyways.

Don't know about the multiplayer elements because I didn't try them.

Good game, October 13, 2008

I heard there won't be a sequel to this game, which is a shame. Great gameplay, lots of fun. If you like running around and causing senseless destruction this is the game for you.

Crackdown is a fun, cheap way to have fun, September 10, 2008

Do you want a cheap game to divert your time? Then Crackdown is the way to go. Since there are AT LEAST 8 of this used at every game store INCLUDING amazon because of people selling them after the Halo 3 Beta ended you can get it for $10. It is awesome for diverting your time and having fun but if you like to get into your games this one isn't good for that. No story, no characters, no cut scenes. Just straight arcade like "here is your objective kill everything that moves (and doesn't have flashing lights/blue uniforms on) to complete it". Add Xbox 360 graphics to that and you have Crackdown. This game was good enough for me to buy it twice since my first copy got stepped on.


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							January 8, 2009


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