Crackdown 2 Review - Bring It Baby!

Would you like to be able to lift up a car? I used to think I did, and then I thought of its practical uses. Besides parking in unfeasibly large gaps and working at Quik Fit there aren’t any I can think of. What about being able to punch a dude 40 feet into the air just for looking at your girlfriend? Now we’re talking! Jumping tall buildings? Again unless you’re a window cleaner or late for work there’s no practical application. Unless you are a super solider out to clean up the streets of your beloved city.... this is Crackdown 2, lets crack some skulls!

Crackdown 2 begins 10 years after the epic events of the first game. Pacific City isn’t looking so peachy these days. What was once a vibrant and well lit city has become a truly sinister place to live. (Sadly) Gone are the gangs, but in their place is a terrorist group called Cell, run by the bad-ass ice maiden Catalina Thorne, and the Freaks (the mutants that crop up near the end of the first game), created by a virus that Thorne stole and unleashed upon the populace. The Agency still is around, but it doesn’t have the city in its Judge Dredd style grip that it once had. You are the new agent; fresh from your Super solider shaped test tube created to quell the cell and squash the freaks under your military size 10's. Genetically engineered Super solider fighting for justice, you can’t move for them these days, I bet the dole queue if full of the bicep rippling bad-asses.

One of this game’s best (or worst depending on your feelings) aspects is that you will be familiar with the map. It hasn't changed from the first game. Not much has changed at all in the 10 year span between the story arcs other than things look a lot more run down and dilapidated than they were before. As in the first game, most kills are made using any one of a large selection of ordnance, ranging from shotguns, through Uzi-style sub machine guns right up to rocket launchers. Freaks are resistant to traditional weapons, but developer Ruffian has thoughtfully included a selection of UV weapons that are especially effective against the slippery little buggers. Levelling up is the same also, collect the green agility orbs to jump higher/run faster, punch dudes to death to get stronger and drive like a complete tool to get your driving skill up (more on the new features of this later)

The Agency and Cell have divided up the city with barricades and fort like structures. The Cell occupy 27 tactical areas that the Agency would like back. They work as in the first game sections where you had to take over sections of a gang’s hideout to weaken him/her before you waded in to take them down. Entering one of these zones and triggering the marker on the floor engages a zone takeover, you now have to eradicate the Cell threat before the drop-ships can land and Agents will spill out to provide support securing the area. This method is rinsed and repeated in each zone until you face the zone boss then you move on to the next one. It’s exactly the same model as the first game.

So what about the freaks? Well they are frikking everywhere this time, more so at night al la ‘I Am Legend’. They are overrunning the city and need to be stopped! The clever bods at the agency have developed a weapon called Project Sunburst to take care of the melty faced arseholes. What this entails is running around finding 3 Absorption Units to turn on which will then triangulate the location of the underground lair of the Freaks. You are then tasked with dropping down into the freak love in below and kicking up a real shitstorm. Once you clear the first wave of freaks an Agency helicopter will drop a beacon. Defence then becomes the order of the day as you manically try to stop the Freaks attacking said beacon thus rendering it useless leaving it to become probably freak toilet or some kind. Eventually the beacon will reach full power and unleash its deadly blast which will destroy all Freaks in the area and keep you and any other humans safe from the ugly beasts. There are also a number of Freaks on the streets (lots of nun with a Gatling gun) that you have to send to their doom too. Once day turns into night the Freaks really come out and overtake the city, perfect for you to hop into a nice truck and do some Freak splattering.

Driving was only a fringe part of Crackdown. Sure, for completionists and trophy whores, you had to win races to get all the goodies out of it. If your aim was simply to "finish" the game, there was no need to spend longer in a vehicle than it took to get out of the Agency headquarters at the start of every session - there was no way to get out on foot. Early in the game, vehicles were a convenient way to get around the vast and open city environment but as your speed and physical agility increased, running, swimming and rooftop jumping were, a far better way of getting around. Taking part in races was an option but not something you are compelled to partake of. In Crackdown 2, vehicles are much more integral to the game. As well as cars and trucks, there are also helicopters at your disposal. Using vehicles is still optional, but they are woven into the game much more this time around, and being in a car makes you that much more less susceptible to group Freak attacks. Plus mowing them down in their hundreds is satisfyingly gory and reminds me of all the zombie films that I watched as a teen.

As with the first game, Crackdown 2 is an OCD's paradise. Returning for round 2 are the 500 Ability orbs and 300 Hidden orbs. There is a little twist though; this time around there is some new orbs called Renegade orbs. They can be either Ability or Driving orbs and you have to chase them, around the map... AAARRRGGGH who thought this was a good idea? This proves to be nothing more than frustrating as you’re chasing an agility orb around only to find you dude is not levelled up enough to ever catch it. Not a problem if you haven't been chasing the fecking thing for 20 mins... With the driving orbs you need to be at a certain level or have access to a certain vehicle to get some of them. I can’t stress enough how annoying they are. Another new addition are the 50 audio logs you can collect that will help flesh out the story of the Freaks and the Cell...Any person (like me in crackdown 1) obsessed with getting all the orbs is certainly going to have their hands full and will be playing this game for hours on end falling off a blind corner chasing that last renegade orb. If I ever meet the dev who dreamed that up I am going to insert one of those damned orbs in him.

The biggest hoo-hah about Crackdown 2 has been the talk of 4-player co-op play. WOOT! I hear you say; it is indeed in this game and is unfortunately Xbox Live only (so no System Link like the first game). It a real blast to play cooperatively... at first. This also opens up the Xbox live orbs around the city, so more things to collect! Woo. The problem is that there's not enough to actually do co-operatively after 3 or 4 hours wandering round rinsing Freaks and cell members the attention turns to each other and then it all gets mundane quickly. Remember how GTA sounded a riot online, and then you played it and realised it was shite with no objective, well it’s the same here. Another gripe is that if you play with someone who has a higher ability structure than you, then you simply get nothing from it; they get everything first and can reach areas you can’t follow. You basically get left with mopping up the scraps, not the best online model ever to be honest.

The graphics in the game are good, using the same sort of cell shaded coolness that the first one used. It’s not an OMG! On the graphics front, but then again let’s remember there are hundreds of freaks around at night and it throws lots of bad guys at you so I suppose there is a trade off. For the majority of the game, the frame rate kept smooth but sometime (and it’s rare) you get a little slowdown. The other time was slowdown in a co-op game when you were in close proximity to your teammates along with a lot of enemies around. It’s admirable in co-op that you can go anywhere on the map and be miles away from the rest of the group if you want and the game won’t care and will continue to run smoothly.

The sounds are as good as they were in the first, with the old familiar voice of the Agency head narrating your game-play and he really makes it worthwhile exploring the playing styles. As usual, he employs his all important patronizing tone, congratulating you when you do well and chastising when you balls it up.

Crackdown 2 is much more of the same in regards to maps, game-play and concept as the first game. Actually scratch that, it’s exactly the same. Is that such a bad thing? I don't think so, but some seemed really arsed off that there haven’t been any evolutionary steps from the first game. If you didn’t love the first game stay far away from this game. It’s Still a collector’s paradise and the huge map with the many, many things to do should keep you occupied for hours. The addition of 4-player co-op throughout will also keep you playing even well after you’ve beat it yourself but it’s not the co-op heaven I wanted (please get it right in 3. thanks). Crackdown 2 is like watching your favourite old Arnie film, You can’t say exactly why you think it’s great to your girlfriend because the repeatedly says its rubbish, but it still warms you inside when he shouts “GET TO THE CHOPPA!” its loud, stupid and proud of it.

A slice of gaming pie I don't get sick of, no matter how much I eat.