Questionable tribal tatoos aside, your super cop is bad ass

One of the first games I and many others grabbed for their Xbox 360, Crackdown enjoyed exceedingly high sales for a new IP. Of course this might have something to do with the game including a key to the Halo 3 mulitplayer beta. But those over eager Halo fan boys and girls found, much to their surprise, that this game they had essentially been forced to buy was awesome in its own right.

Crackdown sees you as the first super cop in a town overrun by gangs called Empire City. There are three main islands, each controlled by a specific gang with a small central island connected to each by an underground roadway. This central island is Agency headquarters and you’re starting location.

If you grew up with the Saturday morning cartoons of the eighties Crackdown is going to resonate very strongly with you. Turn around and behold your secret underground garage containing your special unique Agency vehicles. You have the choice of a sports car (that goes under traffic) an SUV (that goes over traffic) and a truck cab (that goes through traffic). These three midnight blue machines look pretty nifty to begin with but as you level up your driving ability  the cars will actually morph and evolve when you get in them. The sports car looks like the Tim Burton era Batmobile minus the Bat motif and the SUV transforms into a monster struck. This metamorphisis just looks cool and you’ll find yourself getting in and out of your car frequently to watch it change back and forth.

You have four skills that can be levelled up as the game progresses: strength, agility, driving and weapons. Strength and weapons are levelled up by shooting, exploding and beating the crap out of bad guys. Driving can be levelled up by races and by running over bad guys and agility, your ability to leap huge distances and run really fast is mostly unlocked by collecting several hundred green agility orbs littered around the city. The orbs in Crackdown (there are also a hundred blue secret orbs) are famous for their addictive properties. They can be seen from pretty far away and as you get close to one you hear a faint pulsing sound. The agility orbs are usually in hard to reach places and some won’t even be accessible to you until you reach level four agility. There are also several Stunt Rings that appear when you are driving at a certain angle in a certain place. Managing to get your car through the ring nets you a lot of experience and the bouncing ability of the SUV’s evolved form is essential to achieve this.

You start the game with a fairly vanilla choice of a machine gun, pistol and grenades but any and all weapons you pick up from dead gang members can be returned to one of your safe houses that dot the city and added to your growing gun collection. The bad guys have a hierarchy and while you can essentially go straight for the top dog and try and take him out you’ll find this rather tricky. Taking out each of the underlings first affects the capo’s defences such as number of guards and quality of weapons.

One of Crackdowns best features is its online coop allowing you and a friend free reign of the city. You can help each other out with missions or go racing, do some coop challenges, or just toss cars at each other. This combined with Crackdowns fantastic DLC that adds new agency vehicles and weapons adds a lot of replayability to the game. One of my personal favourite features of Crackdown was the achievements and they stand as testament of achievements done right, an equal measure of skill and fun. My favourite was the ‘Body Armour’ achievement that required you to use the Spear gun from the DLC to skewer five people to a car, then drive around town with their bodies flapping around.

It might seem a little dated compared to some of the most recent open world games but the combination of super powered cops, open world gameplay and morphing cars makes Crackdown a classic on the Xbox 360.