Review: Crackdown 2

Xbox 360

By James Heffield / Friday, July 09 2010

Crackdown 2 picks up where its open-world predecessor left off, unleashing you once again on Pacific City.

The unfortunate city has been hit by a virus that has turned many of its inhabitants into zombie-like “Freaks”. While this has been going down, an anti-government group “Cell” has emerged and is trying to seize the reigns of power.

That’s where you step in. Playing as a cybernetically enhanced agent who looks a little like the spawn of Iron Man and Robocop, you fight crime while leaping from building to building like an armed flea on heat.

As you play through the game, completing tasks and killing Cell members and Freaks, you will develop your skills and attributes. Improving your firearms and explosives skills will open the door to more advanced weaponry, while upping your agility will allow you to jump further and higher. If driving is your thing, you can complete race challenges and pick up driving orbs to improve your driving skill, allowing you to better maneuver cars, trucks and armoured vehicles.

Punching, kicking and stomping on enemies in melee combat will improve your strength. This allows you to pick up, swing and throw a wide range of objects, ranging from bodies and trash cans to steel pylons, cars and gun turrets. The developers at Ruffian Games have made an obvious effort to include a wide variety of items that can be manipulated and wielded to suit your purposes and it’s this malleable world that gives the game its originality.

Of course, any game needs some direction and storyline to keep you interested, and it‘s here that Crackdown 2 is found wanting. It’s great for the first few hours, but the repetitious tasks handed down by your masters at the agency become tiresome after a while. There is only so much jumping to the top of a building to shoot people, jumping down to ground level to shoot people, then descending into the underground to shoot people that anyone can handle. Add to that the overly simplistic controls - mash the B button for melee combat and use the left shoulder button to auto-target enemies when shooting - and the game loses much of its challenge.

Multiplayer co-op and death match modes on Xbox Live alleviate these woes slightly by providing a little more unpredictability, but the bare bones remain the same.

The graphics are another problem area. Designers of the original Crackdown were celebrated for using cel-shading to make the environment and enemies appear like comic book drawings. This is again evident in Crackdown 2, but it’s less effective this time around. Graphics have improved significantly over the past couple of years and the block-like, almost Stalinistic style of many of the game’s buildings and vehicles leaves a lot to be desired.

Interestingly, the agency you work for and the city’s “Peacekeepers” security force exude a distinctly totalitarian, almost 1984, vibe. You can’t help but think that the population was already in some kind of crackdown-induced zombie-like state before the virus hit. Maybe those revolutionary chaps in Cell aren’t so bad after all?

Crackdown 2
Developer: Ruffian Games
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Better than: Crackdown
Worse than: Grand Theft Auto IV

Jumping around like a gun-toting flea on heat becomes boring after a while.

6.5/10