For 360 owners who've lived under a boulder on the dark side of Mars, 2007's Crackdown was an ecstatic surprise for people who had grown weary of the formulaic gameplay of GTA sequels and their clones. The ability to be Superman (if Superman traded in his moral conscience for a rocket launcher and glow in the dark battle armor) highlighted the suspicion that sandbox games may have forgotten to be fun in favor of realism. So naturally when I heard my friend got the sequel today, I rushed over to play it expecting another transcendental experience.
What I got was the SAME experience . . . only less transcendental.
Let's get the obvious out of the way: Crackdown 2 is still about juggling people and vehicle alike with rockets, jumping ridiculous distances to collect orbs and disregarding society's laws. And 3 years later, without discernable change, it's still fun.
But that's where the good stops. You remember how Crackdown had no real story, just a little intro about how the city was taken over by gangs and was overall a piece of crap? Do you also remember how much fun the game was not being tied to a plot? Crackdown 2 seems to have forgotten how well that work.
Crackdown 2 tries to give you a plot about betrayal and top secret military programs and gone awry. I've played games like that before, so I wasn't immediately turned off by it. But after the intro, the plot stops. I'm not even joking; there's a vague audio log scattered here and there but for the 3 - 4 hours I played I can safely say that I could barely gather any more exposition.
The beauty of Crackdown not being driven by a plot was that no matter how difficult the objectives were, you could complete them in any order no matter how nonsensical. But Crackdown 2 is all about working your way up to the big ol' baddie who started the mess in the first place and while that formula isn't bad, you need a coherent plot to tie it all together.
Also, Crackdown 2 literally uses the same city, albeit with some buildings destroyed and a layer of brownish red over everything. It's one thing to have buildings and roads to have a similar design to previous games, but it's quite another thing to reuse almost the entire map. I mean, does this look slightly familiar?
The targeting still jerks the camera around occasionally and the melee is still a bit wonky, but Crackdown 2 makes one MAJOR improvement in my books: corpse targeting. While it still happens, it happens nowhere as frequently as in the original where you would continue to lock onto a dead body long after an entire rifle clip had downed him. Also, the vehicle types and missions have improved enough not to break the flow of gameplay.
The multiplayer mode is now larger scale, but the dull functioning map, lack of waypoints, and overall unfinished feel keep it from being more than a gimmick.At least the co-op gameplay is fun.
And I might as well address this, because a few publications have brought this up, Crackdown 2 does NOT have bad graphics . . . but it IS ugly. The cel-shading worked well in the original because of the vibrant colors of the city. However, when you try shade post apocalyptic brown and mutant green, you get this:
It looks like a 12 pack of color pencils vomited onto the concept art.
It feels like the developers misunderstood why Crackdown was greeted with so well. It's awards were for innovation, not for game of the year which means it was flawed but forgiven due to its uniqueness. But innovation only strikes once, and rereleasing Crackdown with only a few marginal attachments only magnifies the flaws of the original.
Verdict: If you didn't play Crackdown, Crackdown 2 is worth the buy because to new players it will have all the innovative charm for those that played the original. Those of you who DID play the first romp through Pacific City and were hoping for a big improvement, you'll be disappointed. For those who don't mind the near cloning, this game is worth full price but everyone else just rent.
