As the franchise the brought the open-ended ‘sandbox’ design philosophy to the forefront of gaming, Rockstar’s most infamous creation is inevitably compared to every new title that boasts free-roaming gameplay. As the latest brain-child from the original creator of GTA and an open-ended action game to boot, Crackdown has been doubly damned to such comparisons from the moment it was unveiled. Yet despite the player’s ability to freely navigate around a huge environment and commandeer vehicles at will, the two games have very little in common. Whereas Grand Theft Auto guides players through a deep storyline and offers a multitude of tasks to complete, Crackdown puts the focus squarely on the action and gives players one simple task – unleash hell however they see fit.


Story and Presentation

The futuristic setting of Crackdown is one defined by anarchy, as the world has fallen into such chaos that various police organizations have combined their efforts under the banner of the Agency in order to survive. Even with their combined resources however, the Agency has been unable to stem the carnage caused by the various gangs that constantly battling over territory. Now operating out of a highly secure island compound, the Agency has turned to a disgraced scientist to create super-human soldiers, and the player assumes the role of their first prototype, tasked with bringing order to Pacific City by any means necessary. That bare-bones overview of the situation is pretty much all the player gets in terms of a storyline. Since the game is so open-ended and players are free to tackle any of the challenges in any order they see fit there are no narrative threads pushing them along. The game is set up as a hit-list and when players knock off all 21 of the targets they complete the core of the game.

The back story does a decent enough job of setting up the Crackdown universe and giving players a modicum of rationale to back up the slaughter that they’ll carry out. That said, more could have been done in terms of the presentation. Players are only treated to simplistic comic-panel ‘cinematics’ and the narrative is delivered by the omnipresent voice of the player’s superior (or one would gather) via radio. Considering how great the game looks when its moving (screenshots do it no justice), it’s a shame that the developers didn’t opt to include more in-game scripted sequences. The lack of an engaging narrative has a tendency to make the game feel shallow and aimless at times, but on the flip side players who don’t feel like tackling a particular mission are never burdened with doing so in order to progress. The design choice has merit, so really it’s up to the consumer to decide just how important a compelling storyline is to their gaming experience.


Gameplay

The gameplay in Crackdown feels more akin to that of recent superhero games like Ultimate Spiderman or The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction than it does to Grand Theft Auto and its reality-based, story-driven ilk. Like the aforementioned super-hero titles, Crackdown bends the rules of nature in the player’s favor and allows them to treat the game world as their personal playground. With the ability to toss huge objects and jump over buildings, Pacific City feels a lot less like a giant maze, and more like a giant jungle-gym. These types of games make great use of the third dimension by actually allowing players to explore the full 3d space provided rather than being tethered to the ground floor by gravity. Bounding up and down from roof-top to roof-top across the city skyline is an experience that never gets old. Players can experiment and push the limits of their character’s abilities, attempt jumps to platforms that seem just out of reach, play an impromptu game of horseshoes with the bodies of recent victims (watch the havoc physics fold them around telephone poles), or just try to toss semi-trucks as far as possible from the top of sky-scrapers. By opting out of a realistic setting, Real Time Worlds has provided a game with a far greater range of gameplay possibilities, and members of the gaming community will likely be sharing new tricks with each other via co-op mode or youtube for months to come.



Unfortunately, just as the virtual incarnation of NYC in Spider-Man 2 felt less like a living, breathing city than a Petri dish filled with retarded balloon-losing children, bank-robbers, and aimless, street-wandering morons, Pacific City feels like a metropolis of insects waiting for the player to step on them. There’s never an impression that the people bustling through the streets have any purpose other than to obstruct the player’s line of sight, and as a result, the streets - as packed as they are - feel soulless. Perhaps it’s a by-product of placing the player on a pedestal above mere civilians and the laws of nature, but those games that cast the player as just another one of the everyday masses seem to do a better job of making those masses feel more real.