Reviews// Crackdown (Xbox 360)

Graphics-wise, it’s pretty good: characters have a very comic-book style with black lines around them and the texture-work on the buildings is pretty convincing. There is a slight graininess to the graphics, though: you feel they would look an awful lot better if they could be run at 1080p. But you can see what body part you’re shooting from afar, and you get an amazing sense of the game’s vertical elevation.

We suspect that the attributes most players will concentrate on building up are agility and firearms. Leaping from rooftop to rooftop is great fun, and particularly so when you can jump 50 feet in the air and 100 feet horizontally. And while you build up strength by either kicking baddies or chucking whatever objects come to hand at them, it’s much more practical just to shoot them. While the grenades are good – you can target them carefully using the left trigger – you can’t exactly use them as your primary approach, since you can only carry eight.


While the driving is fun, every so often you find purple stunt hoops in accessible places, and if you can launch your vehicle through them, you get a big boost to your attributes – you have to do an awful lot of races before you start getting driving stars.

The firearms targeting system, meanwhile, is exemplary: once you point at an enemy, you can pull and hold the left trigger to lock on, and as you improve your abilities, it becomes much easier to fine-tune your aim for head-shots and so on. Mind you, when you start taking out swathes of baddies with one rocket or grenade, your explosives abilities ramp up pretty swiftly.

But the real star of Crackdown is the environment and architecture. Los Muertos is a comparatively low-rise part of the city, but the buildings are close together and it’s great fun jumping from rooftop to rooftop. You’re able to cling to the tiniest ledges and launch yourself upwards, so you soon learn how to read the architecture and work out how to get to the top of it. But there’s also a rocky, mountainous area, where the kingpin has his base.

The part of town occupied by the Volk is pretty industrialised, so there’s a lot of balancing on pipes, and everything is more spaced out, so it’s more difficult to traverse the rooftops. The Corridor, where the Shai-Gen can be found, is packed with incredibly high skyscrapers: you really need a three-star agility rating to get to the top of them, which is where you need to be.

Jim Cope said: “I really think it’s the first true sandbox game,” and he’s right. Inasmuch as it’s the first totally free-form game in which if you get bored or frustrated, there must be something wrong with you. There is no doubt whatsoever that Crackdown is 2007’s first proper blockbuster.

If you’re an Xbox 360 enthusiast, you’ll be needing a copy of it. Gaming perfection? Not quite. At times, the camera misbehaves and, while you can manipulate it with the right stick, it really annoys you if you don’t nail a precise jump because you couldn’t see what you were doing.

Driving ability ramps up so slowly that you may get bored with that side of the game, and merely use cars as a means of getting from A to B – and they’re not even needed for that due to the Supply Points. Nevertheless, Crackdown is an absolutely top-notch game that provides a juicy dollop of GTA-style action which you can approach from whatever angle suits you best.

SPOnG Score: B
Conclusion
Crackdown, Microsoft’s first big-hitter of 2007, succeeds admirably in its aim of providing an entirely free-form take on that irresistible GTA-style gameplay. The sheer joy of building up your agility, firearms, strength, driving and explosives abilities to superhero levels makes it utterly compelling, despite the lack of a storyline. And three increasingly fearsome classes of enemy keep things interesting – although the stunning city design, with its massive vertical elevations, is the real star of the game. Camera glitches and less than compelling driving mean it isn’t perfect, but there’s no doubt it’s an Xbox 360 must-buy.

Don't forget to read our exclusive interview with Crackdown producer, Phil Wilson, right here.