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Dear Ruffian Games. Clearly we have common interests and I think we should socialise, maybe have a poker night or attend a fondue party together. I mean, I like Crackdown, and you clearly like Crackdown, probably even more than me. Before we spend time together I do need to clear something up. It’s great we have common interests but I think you love Crackdown too much... there I said it.
You love it so much that when commissioned to make a sequel after Real Time Studio dropped the ball, you went and made the same game instead, possibly thinking it was too good to be made better. Unfortunately it is at this point that our opinions go their separate ways.
Crackdown saw you playing as a genetically modified super agent battling three gangs who controlled the three island regions of Pacific City. In addition to super speed, strength and agility you had a variety of cool weapons and vehicles to tackle the enemies with.
Orbs are the crack in Crackdown, you'll here the noise they make in your dreams
The sequel see’s two new factions replacing the gangs, infected mutants who stagger from underground at night to attack civilians and fill the streets with ickiness, and a heavily armed terrorist organisation called Cell who give you trouble during the day time. The basic gameplay elements are identical from the first game. You’ll spend the majority of your time running around the map and killing enemies any chance you get to increase your shooting, demolitions, strength and driving attributes. For agility you’ll likely spend more time scaling buildings and straining your ears for the pulsing sound bite of a nearby orb. Hunting for these suckers is addictive and is definitely one of both the original and this games main draws. Races, both on foot and in a car also net you a bunch of orbs when you complete them.
Those beams of light are a pair of gravity mines, releasing the car will catapult it forward killing anyone in the way. Physics is fun!
The game maintains its cool cell shaded, comic book appearance and bright colourful style, a nice change from the grittiness of most open world games. The city itself is the same as the original game world, although time has reshaped many areas and given them a different look, but the layout is the same which makes things easier to navigate for familiar players. You'll often spot familiar landmarks that have fallen into disrepair.
One of the new features of the game are moving orbs that lead you on a merry (merry translating to ‘painfully frustrating’) chase either by foot or by car, through a predetermined path. The key lies in knowing where the orb is going to be and cutting it off. Unfortunately for the player the driving orbs have a habit of flying down heavily populated alleyways requiring you to mow down hundreds of pedestrians to get them. This calls in the other agency guys, just regular cops, who have a habit of shooting your tires out as you chase after the orb and bringing your chase to an annoying end.
The buggy, a downloadable vehicle in the original, is freely available and even driven around by other Agency cops
Crackdown 2 throws in a few new items and abilities, some of these are more for fun than practicality such as the gravity mines that can be used to suspend objects by anchoring them to buildings, similar to the rope in Just Cause 2, but you can use more than one. You unlock abilities as you level up your physical stats, and reaching full agility allows you to jump to the helicopter pad at the Agency headquarters and take a helicopter gunship which makes most of the game extremely easy. There’s also a small set of UV based weapons that only work on the mutants, sunlight turning them to dust. There is an option now to change your armour colour and you have four character appearances to choose from instead of the original ten, this doesn’t really matter though as the first time you level up your appearance is locked away in a helmet. This strips what little individuality the Agents had in the original game. The agent’s appearance altered as they levelled up into some pretty crazy and unique looks, with masks, tribal tats and weird hair styles; but now in online games everyone looks depressingly the same. Especially confusing as you can now play coop with four players rather than the original two, you think they'd want to make it easier to distinguish between everyone.
How the hell could you miss that?
Despite these few additions Crackdown 2 has some omissions from the first game that lose the sequel some of the originals charm. The worst offender for me was no longer having access to your cool underground super cop garage from where you could drive, with one of your custom morphing vehicles, through a cool Thunderbirds like launch tunnel to any of the islands. Now you can only drop to one of your unlocked tactical locations around the map. Likewise the morphing vehicles that upgraded and changed their appearance as your agent did have been replaced with a series of agency vehicles that unlock as your driving skill increases. For such a cool and iconic feature of the original to be replaced with something so prosaic is a bitter pill to swallow. You really needed to see the morphing vehicles to get why they were cool; newcomers probably won't mind.
Explosions look fantastic in Crackdown 2, a good thing too as you are normally in the middle of them
The original games layout of eliminating the lower ranking gangster bosses to soften up the main boss was an excellent system as well. Not to mention each of the gangs offering an increasing level of challenge. While the game let you travel anywhere in the city from the beginning it was pretty clear that certain areas were going to be tougher to navigate before levelling up. Unfortunately this system has also been chucked.
In Crackdown 2, the difficulty curve is still there as you face slightly tougher mutants and better armed Cell troops, but it lacks the personality and goal orientated gameplay of eliminating the individual bosses. Basically there’s only three tasks to be completed in the game and you’ll have done them all in the first thirty minutes of play. Then you’ll spend several hours doing them over and over again to finish the game. The storyline is entirely supplied by audio logs littered around the city which give you insight into the Agency, Cell and the mutants, but its entirely possible to play the whole game without ever picking one of them up. The whole experience leaves the single player feeling like a Halloween candy, short and sweet but ultimately hollow and meaningless. You’ll have fun while you play it, but you’ll be hard pressed to explain to yourself why you played it for so long.
Accessing the helicopter makes the rest of the game a cakewalk as you rain firey death upon the enemies
The disparate parts of Crackdown 2 don’t quite fit together all that well. It’s difficult to break of combat to go orb hunting or run a race because the tasks interfere with each other. The few activities you have available just don’t mesh well, mostly due to infinitely spawning enemies and the bad habit of your ally agency troops to turn their guns on you if you accidentally crush someone during a race or a stunt jump. Once you’ve done about half your levelling up across all your skills you’ll notice the difficulty curve level out as the game compensates by throwing greater numbers of enemies at you which seems to take up more time than offer a real challenge. In my review of the original oh so many years ago I bemoaned the fact you never tackle anything harder than a regular human with a rocket launcher and the same is true of the sequel. There’s a bit more effort with some heavily armed and armoured cell troops showing up and some super mutants to contend with. But neither are a decent match for your Agent. The game is certainly good at crafting you into, and letting you play as, a super cop, but not that great at compensating with some super cop challenges. By comparison look at Prototypes enemies, they evolved and provided real challenge to your super powered monster character. When you can defeat all but the most giant mutant monster with a single kick to the face it sucks the challenge and fun right out of it.
Your armour can now execute a slightly controlled glide move when you rank up your agility.
Crackdown 2 would have earned itself a solid two stars from me but it’s multiplayer manages to scrape together an extra one. The best way to describe the competitive multiplayer is a third person Halo match at about three times the speed. Players leap and sprint around the designated area like mad with rockets and bullets flying in all directions. It can be a helluva lot of fun with the right people. Currently there is only a deathmatch, team deathmatch, and rocket tag (Oddball) style game types but you can easily lose a weekend in leaping sprinting and shooting all over the place. It’s a hoot to have a guy chase you round the corner, then you grab a car of the ground and bring it down on his head while he reloads. The cooperative multiplayer is also a lot of fun with up to four players able to team up to fight Mutants and Cell troops, or take part in a versus race by car or on foot. Completionists will want to get a fellow obsessive on call as in addition to the hundreds of secret and agility orbs littered around there are a few hundred coop orbs that need a mate standing few feet away to pick up.
Cooperation is how friends solve problems, that and shooting the S#!t out of stuff
If you haven’t played Crackdown before, then you should probably play that first, then if you really, really like it, this game. Crackdown 2 was a brief but entertaining game for me solely because I’d done it all before, I’d orb hunted and roof raced plenty all ready and was looking for the next level here, an expansion of the last experience. Instead Crackdown 2 is almost the same game with an expansion pack tweaking the experience. If you absolutely loved Crackdown, could not get enough of it, then you’ll no doubt be happy, but I can’t imagine there’s that many people of that opinion out there. Most Crackdown fans like me will lament the fact some of our favourite features have been dropped in some dubious design choices. Newcomers will find a game that’s fun, but doesn’t quite rank above similar titles of the last few years. The games experience will most likely be made the richer for all the downloadable content that, I imagine, is lined up to roll out and expand the game. The original Crackdown had some DLC that expanded the fun factor and longevity of the game in a big way. Crackdown 2 isn’t bad or broken, it’s just been done and reheated without a compelling reason for players to want to redo it.
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