The first Crackdown was one of the unsung heroes of the 360 - guaranteed good sales by being bundled with access to the Halo 3 beta, its comic superhuman simulation earned it a cult following, and rave reviews.
This is Crackdown - over the top, comic book style, crime fighting mayhem.
While most superheroes have a bit of a tragic back story, or some kind of moral code that means they can only use their superpowers when the situation requires, the biologically enhanced hero of the first Crackdown has no such rules. Presented with a city overrun with miscreants, it was up to you to rid the city of bad guys, and protect the civilians through any means necessary - by leaping over buildings, punching random bad guys 50 foot down the road, and kicking cars off bridges. After all - these were the lowest of the low who were tearing up your town - and you had a right to respond with necessary force, and commandeer anything you came across to fight the good fight. It's not your fault your arms are the size of tree trunks, and bullets pretty much just bounce off your flesh - but it does mean that you can uphold the law with a bit more authority than a police community support officer.
Set ten years after the cliffhanger ending of the first game, Crackdown 2 sees you, as the genetically modified law enforcer, returning to Pacific City (the city from the first game) which has been overrun with genetic freaks (some sort of genetically modified humans, that haven't gone quite as well as you did) that you, er, accidentally unleashed during the first game. The remaining unmutated survivors have formed a terrorist organization known only as "The Cell", and as the first new Agent in the city, it's your job to clean up.
Unlike the first game, where the only thing you had to do in order to "clean up" was defeat a few gang bosses who were scattered around the map, Crackdown 2 has a slightly more varied mission structure, where instead of just going somewhere and beating someone up, there's an actual mission structure, which gives you objectives to complete, such as collecting parts for a super weapon, or infiltrating an underground nest of the freaks to, er, show them the error of their ways, but the focus on beating up the bad guys remains as strong as ever.
Look at that Graffiti. Kids these days...
How difficult clearing out the freaks nests/the Cell Strongholds is will also vary depending on the time of day you choose to visit them. During the night, the freaks come out into the streets, meaning that their nests are empty. Conversely, at night the Cell members go back to their strongholds, meaning that there'll be more of them there if you decide to try and raid thm at night. The day-night cycle adds a bit of strategy to the game, as navigating the streets when the freaks come out can get quite tricky at night if you don't have a car, so to begin with it's safer to stick to the rooftops at night, at least until you've leveled up slightly.
Agility Orbs are always high up in hard to reach places
The leveling up system is near-enough identical to the first game. Your superhero has five different skill categories that you can level up by sticking to a principal that our parents instilled in us at an early age - practice makes perfect. Quite simply, the more you do things which utilise your skills, the better you'll get at them. If you choose to apprehend criminals by kicking them around a bit, you'll increase your physical skills - take them down in a car, and you'll upgrade your driving. Completing rooftop races and collecting agility orbs will help you to jump higher, and run faster, and you can increase your explosives rating by, you guessed it, blowing stuff up.
The aforementioned orbs, one of the most popular parts of the original game also make a welcome return in Crackdown 2, with 500 agility orbs and 300 hidden orbs located through Pacific City to appease the more collectible crazy players. They're also joined by new Renegade Orbs, which try to escape from you when you get near them, and Online Orbs that can only be collected while playing online with at least one more player. Another new addition (and possible cheat), is the orb radar, that allows you to press up on the directional pad and see on your mini map if there are any orbs in your immediate vicinity.
Allowing you to simply explore the city at your own pace, without having to worry about completing missions, collecting orbs was one of our favourite parts of the original Crackdown, as just scouring the city looking for orbs was a lot more fun than it sounds.
Also making a return, and being revamped for the new game is the co-op mode, which lets you and now up to three friends team together to rid the city of bad guys, and also find all the various orbs. If you ever get stuck, the ability to have a friend join your game, and help you take out a particularly tough gang leader, or help you find that last evasive orb was a blast. In fact, on the first Crackdown, we used the co-op mode to great effect, although we're fairly sure it wasn't how the mode was intended to be used!
As one of the characters was a lot bigger, stronger, and faster than the other (and could therefore jump higher), we'd often come across ledges, buildings, or other areas that the one character simply couldn't access - either because they couldn't jump high enough yet, or they weren't tough enough to survive the countless enemies. Rather than having to slog through levelling up, we tried a different approach. Starting by getting the weaker character to sit in a car (or occasionally a skip), the stronger of the pair would then lift the car (with the weaker player inside), before running, leaping into the air, and throwing it wherever the other player had been trying to get to. Crazy, yes, but it worked, and it was certainly a laugh.
Thankfully, the co-op aspect's really been fleshed out this time round, with new co-op specific vehicles on offer, including something we've dubbed the battle bus, a bus/tank hybrid that lets all four players sit in it, and cause havoc. The feeling of team work, and the mayhem you cause as you go around the city as an elite, crime fighting unit is easily the best point of Crackdown 2 - and with double the players online when compared to the first game, we can only see this getting better.
We love the battle bus.
With online co-op to let new players be "mentored" by more experienced, or higher level characters, new orbs for the collectaholics to hunt down, and more variation to the missions, Crackdown 2 is seems to be building on everything that made the first game such a tremendously enjoyable experience. We'll have a full review upon the game's launch, in just over a week's time..
