Crackdown is an exclusive for xbox 360 and the first game by the developer, it has one of the developrs of GTA 1 and 2 and its one of the few games in existence for open world campaign CO-Op , i played it a lot when I was little but that was almost 15 years ago so lets see how it holds up
The premise is simple, youre a 'peace keeper' aka police, to clean up the city from criminals. Theres 3 gangs, and they are in 3 different areas sorted by colors. All you do is spawn into the game, roam around the map until you find a boss, infilitrate the boss HQ and take out soldiers and then kill boss, then move onto the next. Theres 20 something in total. Its got a skill upgrade system where you level up different areas like guns, melee/health, jumping ability (which makes you jump really high), cars, etc.
On paper the game sounds pretty cool, like a relaxing game to jump into some mindless co-op with your buddy and roam around open world killing bosses. Unfortunately, its got some massive flaws that hinder almost all enjoyment.
First of all you might think the idea of the skill system could feel rewarding and fun, but unfortunately it probably just makes the game worse. For example, the health is tied to the Melee stat, so the only way to get more health is by awkwardly using melee to kill the enemies. This becomes a big deal because when you get further the enemies can kill you super quick and if you didnt spend tedious amounts of time grinding melee kills your health will be tiny and you wont survive. So then we had to just spend time going around grinding melee kills which just felt stupid. The melee in general is worthless and only valuable because its tied to health. So thats strike one.
The other stats like Agility, are probably the biggest part of the game. Theres these orbs all over the city which actually are cleverly designed to entice you to actually spend time exploring and jumping all around the city to collect them, because collecting them makes you level up the Jump/run speed ability which is integral to success. So it is pretty fun just jumping around rooftops collecting these orbs, however it has a sort of fatal design flaw of making the Driving ability pretty much completely worthless. I maybe spent 10 minutes total driving a car in this whole game, the running/jumping ability just makes it have no purpose.
The other skills arent worth mentioning, shooting skill is self-explainatory, and you level up by killing guys, explosives is shit, driving worthless.
Another major annoying flaw is the 'checkpoints' in this game operate by safehouses you find throughout the map. Usually to access these safehouses you have to do this guessing game of how to awkwardly climb up these gigantic buildings, jumping on window ledges, climbing up poles, its just not that fun. Maybe the first few times, but time and time again having to put aside 10+ minutes just trying to climb up a stupid building to unlock a safe house just becomes tedious more than enjoyable.
And finally the worst flaw of all: The only way to figure out how to progress is by just roaming around the map mindlessly until you come across a boss. This means a significant amount of time is spent as 'downtime' where you're not even doing anything just wondering "Where the fuck is the next boss" and walking / jumping around the map like an idiot trying to find them. All they had to do was show you all the boss locations by default on the map and the game would have been atleast significantly better. But no, the pacing sucks and you kill one boss, then you spent 20-30 minutes walking around doing NOTHING looking for the next one. Theres just no direction, it feels half assed. Its also extremely glitchy in co-op and sometimes boss events/enemies wont even spawn in until you restart the game.
Theres not much to speak of a story, theres barely any cutscenes and they only happen in the form of short radio intermissions, which is kind of a positive actually, but theres just not much to the game. As a premise it could be really fun, but its got way too many flaws and bad design choices.
Some of the shooting can be pretty fun when you get into the groove, its got this lockon system where you can aim at individual body parts and then wait for the crosshair to become small to consistently hit them, but thats about all there is to the shooting mechanics. Just lock on and wait for the crosshair to become small then hold down the trigger. And theres basically only one viable weapon in the whole game, the LMG, its just so overpowered i dont know why any other gun sucks so much compared to it but they do.
The graphics can be impressive at times, its got a lot of color and character sort of cell shaded around the edges , its got some impressive draw distance, but its rough around the edges. The HUD looks like it was made in MS paint, and the AI is pretty dumb.
-Bad clunky controls, aiming system is janky accidentally targeting bodies on ground, wrong targets, you punch walls by holding the shoot button all the time, bad controls
-General game deisgn promising but ruined execution by hiding bosses behind randomly roaming around
-Only one gun is actually good, LMG, rest feel like crap.
- Shooting can be fun , seeing orbs pop out of enemies can be rewarding, but the lack of depth or viable weapons makes it too repetitive
- Glitchy in co op, when both partners die the bosses glitch out and just dont spawn anymore until you restart the console
- Annoying climbing buildings with awkward platforming floaty controls every 'checkpoint' spawn point is by climbing buildings high up awkwardly trying to figure out the route to get up its just not that fun and tedious
- Level design is arbitrary and just random BS that doesnt make sense, stuff slapped together with abrupt dead ends, large open spaces, nonsense archetecture, most of the bosses you have to climb super high skyscrapers with no clear pathway up
5/10
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