Crackdown

The only reason people bought this game because it came with Halo 3 Beta. This game is for the Xbox 360. To be honest, I wasn't thrilled with this game, it looked like a Grand Theft Auto (GTA) clone, hands down. And it was...but that doesn't mean it isn't worth playing.

The sound in Crackdown is pretty nice, though it is a bit over the top volume-wise. Stuff is just loud, plain and simple. But the quality of the sound is good. No major problems here, aside from occasionally you won't hear the sound when you land after a large fall. Graphics were not that bad. It was a step up from Grand Theft Auto. The glaring problem here is that it's full of glitches that will randomly make large patches of terrain and objects vanish.

Gameplay was where the developers' focus was, and they did a good job on it, mostly. The controls are essentially the same from a GTA game but with the added bonus of superpowers. The ability to jump 30 feet in the air is a refreshing and fun idea. I like jumping around the city from building to building. It gets old after a while however. The targeting system is rather annoying. If there is more than one enemy in front of you, targeting a specific one is a nightmare. And when enemies are killed, you are, for whatever unknown reason, still able to lock on to their bodies; again, very annoying when dealing with a group of two or more enemies. When breaking into a "boss's lair," the game does compensate for your superpowers by loading the area with enemies that have almost 100% accuracy. You could pretty much get by in this game using only the strength skill (trained by meleeing enemies), and the shooting skill. Agility is painfully slow to level, driving sucks because the only useful cars are the ones from the Agency Garage. Explosives is a really fun skill. Watching realistic explosions is really exciting. However, you might kill civilians or peacekeepers, thus slowing your training in this skill. Still, the gameplay overall isn't bad, there are just some elements to the game that overshadow others. There are also some downloadable content available on Xbox Live, which ruined the game for me because i dont have Live.

A storyline?!?!? I didn't know there was one! Well, alright, TECHNICALLY there is a story but its flat, boring, and only makes the most pathetic of attempts at being interesting. Here's the story: You are in Pacific City. There are 3 gangs each with 7 members. Go around, find the 6 lower members in each gang, then find the leader, kill them all, game over. At the end, they throw in this random "twist" that is a blatant attempt to make the story interesting, but only serves to make you go, "Huh?...Well that's just dumb." It's mostly just lame.

Replay value is another dissappointment. Once again, I didn't know there was any. If there's one trait they didn't inherit from GTA, its the fun side stuff. There are no side missions or anything in Crackdown. The only variance from the main "story" (term used loosely) are the two dozen are so foot and car races, as well as the nearly 1000 agility and hidden orbs around the city that help to increase your skills.

Overall, this game is pretty fun, but only for a little while. You can pretty much accomplish everything interesting in this game in about 6 hours, if even that long. If you are attempting all of the achievements it will take significantly longer, but even the achievements don't really inspire you to play much longer than the feeble story holds out. Rent it, save your money.