Crackdown 2 Review
Ah yes Crackdown 2. Sorry for the delay, I’m sure everyone has been waiting with bated breath for my musings on Pacific City and so here they are. No doubt destined to frequent every worst game of the year list come Xmas, Ruffian games follow up to Real-time worlds sleeper hit is probably the biggest mess you will play this year. Muffled half idea’s mixed together with a rehashed ugly city are just two of the huge problems the game has, lets look at the rest.
I’m not going to go into the specifics of the games narrative here, there are other reviews out there in the world that will spend a sentence on the ‘story’ but not mine. The game is set in the same city as Crackdown 1, oh, except now some of stuff has been blown up….have you ever played Liberty City Stories? You know that part where the gas main explodes and changes the way the city looks slightly? Well that PSP game, looks better then this appalling rehash of the last games location. Worse is the out dated way in which you explore the world. The main draw of the game (the agility orb collecting) is made pretty much redundant; ruffian have simply drained all the good out of the satisfying levelling up system. See, if you want people to traverse your world you have to at least give them the tools to do it. Too often are you left bumping your agents head off a window ledge that’s just a little to far out for you to jump right up to. Leaving you with the only option of performing a kind of awkward swinging jump outwards into the void; and with nothing but luck on your side the jump often ends with you landing on the street and thinking ‘yeeeeah, time to move on’. The games exploration mechanic’s are just broken. With games out there like Just Cause and Infamous or even Toy Story 3, there is just no way I could recommend this game over any of them. Traversing a world as a super human should be at the very least easy and when done right its hard to match its awesomeness. Agents cant climb at all, all they can do is jump high and hold on to things. Window ledges to be specific. Imagine what prototype would have been like if Alex could only jump and grab, oh and kind of glide, sometimes. Or if Cole couldn’t dynamically climb and grind in Infamous? It would suck right? So what they hell were ruffian playing for the last two years that they thought they could just leave the last games awkward mechanics intact and not think they would feel out dated? There is some fun to be had collecting and levelling up but the pitiful character customization options kind of left me wondering why I would want to play as such a faceless clone when I could be investing my time in an at least half written character like Rico from Just Cause, at least he’s kind of funny?!
What about the rest of the mechanics? Well lets see. You level up your agent by collecting orbs but also by performing specific skill sets like…punching. How do you level them up fast? You stand in the middle of a freak filled road and spam X. You see, the best way I could describe Crackdown 2 is that it feels like the beta for really bad action MMO, you grind, there is a kind of story and the combat is unbelievably boring. Except there is none of the other investments that games in that genre offer. Sure you can play with other people online but its about as interesting as Free Roam mode in GTA4, there just isn’t that much to do. The competitive modes are interesting but just not tight enough to gain anything but the slightest bit of attention over some of the big hitters out there.
The gun play is nearly more interesting with some nice additions to the tool set but often it feels like they have been nurfed to near potato shooter status and apart from the UV weapons never make you feel like that much of a bad ass. The much touted magnet grenades are interesting but the cool explosions from the last game (which by the way I liked quiet a bit) have been replaced by hideous looking things. Its not all bad though, I really dug the way the achievements are announced in game and ploughing through a hundred freaks on the road is fun the first time you do it. So yeah there you go I balanced it out nicely.
Sigh, I don’t know. Maybe if you enjoyed some of the grinding from Borderlands you will get some enjoyment here but if not go elsewhere. This game is unfinished and worse of all, just not fun. Microsoft have yet again released an expansion pack and tried to charge is full price for it. If you want to purchase this in a years time when the price is more then halved you can add an extra half a star to the score.
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