First off let me preface this review by saying I am not a pro reviewer just a gamer who as you could have guessed it, likes to game. My comments, attitude and review are not those of Gameapex but just of a 26 year old curmudgeon.

So today, I am going to review the game Crackdown or as many people like to call it “The $60 Halo 3 Beta Code” and honestly, that is a reason I bought it (since I got denied every other way). The other reasons are that I like sandbox games, comicy/comic book style drawn games and games where the overall goal is to beat the crap out of everything that looks at you funny. To keep in a sort of pace of other 360 reviews I have nicely stolen NCXCstud’s review points.

Story 3/5
Well, some crazy and stereotypical gangs have taken over the capitol city of Pacific City. What do I mean by stereotypical? I mean that the European gang all has crazy Russian names and nicknames in their titles, like something out of a James Bond novel. Same goes with the Asian gang and their leader “Wang”. Yes, I did at the end have to google “How do I get to Wang” with depressing, hilarious and exactly what you would expect results. The overall story isn’t half bad. The gangs have pretty much run over the police so they decided to create a super soldier. That super soldier is you. A you who can leap from rooftop to rooftop, aim with hawk eye accuracy and kick an 18 wheeler a good 30 yards. With these powers you have to hunt down the heads of different operational heads of the gangs and dispose of them any way you can. Even a nice surprise in the end.4

Graphics 4/5
As I mentioned above I am a sucker for comic book style drawn games. God help me I know that XIII was not a good game but I loved the art style in it and will forever claim I love it. The one thing that really got me was the various buildings in the game. I expected a lot more of ‘ohhh, another square building that is green’ but they did a very good job of taking that same green building adding different accoutrements and actually making it look different. The buildings are almost all nicely detailed with a style all their own. I thought the water in this game looked phenomenal. I had a lot of fun shooting rockets into the water and looking at the spray. The character detail is not half bad. Please bear in mind it is no Gears of War character detail but still not half bad. You have those nice black lines that really make you stand out and give that illusion that you are playing a comic book. The NPC’s look nice and the animations on them are nice as well.

Sound 2/5
See the above score and keep that in mind for this part. Cars should have different sounds in different gears right? Not in the Crackdown world. A sports scar has one long high pitched sound. A semi has one long low rumbling sound. If there is a sound difference in shifting gears, please someone let me know and I will take this back. Weapon sounds are run of the mill. It sounded like the only difference between the HMG and the MG was they made the HMG louder. An exploding grenade sounds like an exploding rocket and an exploding car sounds like a rocket or grenade. The NPC’s do scream and occasionally throw in cussword since that is still edgy in video games (please note sarcasm). The NPC screams and shouts are not varied. After the three millionth time of hearing “What the F*#ck is going on?” or “Oh Sh!t” it got old and the sound got turned down to a nice 10 instead of my usual 50.

Controls 4/5
Can you play any of the new Grand Theft Autos? If so, you are in luck. Nothing new, innovative or even unique to this game but PLEASE do not take that as a bad thing. I don’t want or need multiple button combos to run around a city and destroy things. I need a smash button, a gun button and a get me another Dr Pepper button (this last one is usually accomplished by tricking my wife into the room and asking her for one, not really a button per say but I digress).

Gameplay 4/5
Not to bad. Some of the jumping techniques take a little getting used to but once you pick up on that you are good to go jumping around like a heavily armed ape. Boss fights all pretty much go the same way, “Charge in, kill em all, kill the boss, charge out”. Consider you really only have to do this 21 times and 2 of those times there is a slight puzzle element. By slight I mean almost on the level of of the 4 piece puzzles for 3 year olds. Luckily for you there is a decent variety of weapons so you can change your approach and the way you decide to take on the bad guys. In this game you have to increase core skills. These are things like strength, firearms, explosives and agility. Most of these are easy, kill someone with a gun and get gun points. Kill someone with an explosive and get explosive points. Agility is one of them that is slightly different. On various rooftops there are “hidden agility icons”. This adds a new game play element into it called “how many of the 500 can you find?” I personally am at around 236. You need these to increase your jumps so you can find more. I actually had a good time figuring out what buildings to climb and how and what buildings I can jump to.

Multiplayer 0/0
Not really sure as I did not allow anyone to connect but this game is not really geared toward MP although I have read it can be fun.

Overall 4/5
Enough to keep you busy and a story mode that is slightly repetitive but keeps you exploring and discovering to what new heights you can soar.

Superheroes
• Clean, crisp graphics
• Fun weapons and powers to keep you busy

Supervillains
• Slightly repetitive
• Sounds that make me wish I didn’t have surround.


Well, that’s it for me, hope you enjoyed it and since there will be no NDA on Halo 3 beta I will for sure be blabbing about it a lot.

Great review bro! Thanks for contributing!

Thanks Spectrum. This is my heavily edited one. I had way to much fun creating paragraphs with NPC's yelling "what the f' is going on" to situations like getting the wrong drink from a machine or stubbing their toe and pages of bad bond villain names. I think i may do one for the 360 version of NBA Live '07 if thats cool.

Great review RevKWR!! I would like to try this game out but I dont think I will buy it. From your review and from what I have heard on the street this game is very disappointing! We will have to hook up on LIVE sometime and have a battle!

Quote: Originally Posted by PhLaKz'R Great review RevKWR!! I would like to try this game out but I dont think I will buy it. From your review and from what I have heard on the street this game is very disappointing! We will have to hook up on LIVE sometime and have a battle!

Its not something with a story like a FF game or anything like that but if you want a game that you can spend maybe a few hours here or there just destroying people and things then its at least worth a rent.

Great contribution Rev! I've been curious about this game (since they are evidently using the Halo 3 thing to sell it, haha).

Yeah after posting back in March I ended up buying this game. And I did play the Halo 3 Beta and I dont have one good thing to say about it and I am not about to get into a Halo war.