Crackdown

Okay, several years ago I went through a phase of buying games just because. Not because they were easy and not because they were quick but simply because they were games. Crackdown must be one of these games as I can’t think of any other reason as to why it’s in my collection. Anyway, one of friends who I completed Saints Row II with pointed out that he needed to complete Crackdown and there was a requirement for completing all of the main ‘missions’ in co-op mode. So we did it.

Crackdown is game I can’t make sense of. You are an agent who looks like a criminal and you go around the city killing criminals in the form of three gangs, taking out their leaders and wiping the gangs from existence. Once you have done this to all three gangs, you have completed the game and then can wonder the city doing fuck all for eternity.

The gameplay mechanics really wound me up throughout my time playing the game. A lot of it is centred around the five stats that you can increase to make your agent less shit. These involve shooting stuff with guns, collecting agility orbs, shooting stuff with rocket launchers, punching and kicking people and my personal favourite, driving.

The driving mechanic is total shit. You can get into vehicles Grand Theft Auto style and drive everything in the game but most cars handle poorly and it’s actually quicker and more convenient to run and jump everywhere. You can use agency cars but only if you take them from the agency headquarters so it makes the game’s own fast travel system redundant if you want to use cars as you can’t fast travel in a car.

While I’m talking about driving, I’ll also mention the map mechanic too as that’s garbage. It’s not an interactive map, you cannot set waypoints and you can’t see the entrances back to the agency headquarters which, when you are trying to take vehicles back to impound, is really fucking irritating. I basically had to spend a lot of time learning the map so I would know where to go and how to get there using the roads.

The agility stat also provided a minor annoyance too. You have to jump around collecting agility orbs to level up your jumping ability but the thing I don’t get is that every time your agent jumps, he flails his legs around like he is falling to his death. Not only was this irritating to watch, a lot of buildings in the map cannot be climbed. But they look like buildings that can be climbed. So I make jumps towards ledges that look grabbable only to see my agent flail around like a twat before landing on the ground perfectly fine.

That just leaves the combat mechanics and again the game falls short of basic expectations. When aiming at enemies you lock on to them but there doesn’t appear to be a way of flicking on to another enemy once you are locked on without resetting and starting again. This is made even more irritating by the fact that ‘Agent’ is just as likely to lock on to someone half a mile away than someone shooting him and also just as likely to lock on to a corpse. The hand to hand combat is garbage too. ‘Agent’ will just kick the guy and then stamp on him to finish him off. It’s really hit and miss as whether he will connect with the enemy in the first place too.

Sound-wise, the sound track is just offensive noise for the most part and when your shield goes down, which will happen a lot, the designers thought that having a really annoying beeping sound continuously going off was a good idea. It got to the point where I actually wish they had just killed me.

Crackdown has not aged well either. It looks like a game from 2005 and having spoken to some of my friends who played it when it came out, they said how revolutionary it felt as the time. The controls are archaic too which probably influenced a lot of my thoughts when playing the game.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 50 Achievements

There is a lot of bollocks here and on reflection, I’m not sure what was hard and what was time consuming. Once you have got a firefly rocket launcher and the decent assault rifle, all of the combat becomes repetitive and relatively straightforward so the main game stuff, if playing on easy, will fly by for the most part while feeling like taking forever. There’s only one thing to do. Murder tons of dudes.

Outside of all of the specific achievements for killing people in certain ways and driving like a turnip for a large amount of time, there are a few things I will remember doing for a while. The first one of these is collecting all the orbs.

There are 800 orbs to collect, carrying two achievements, one for agility orbs and one for hidden orbs. There are 500 and 300 of these respectively. There is a fairly solid guide that I used for the hidden orbs but there isn’t a guide for the agility orbs. I went looking for one and found a couple of maps but there are so many that there wasn’t really a way of using it effectively to know which orbs I had and which ones I didn’t and once I was up to 496 orbs, looking for the last four was blood-curdlingly frustrating. It highlights game progression now as most games have in-game collectible tracking or at least separate map-area recordings... but Crackdown is the entire map and there are 800 orbs. Go and find them.

I got down to needing one more agility orb before moving on and trying to find all the hidden orbs and amazingly the last one was in a really obvious place that I thought I had cleared out. This always seems to be the way of collectables with no tracking.

Other than this, there were stunt markers, street races and foot races that need to be completed. The footraces were simple enough bar one which was a total fucker, but the street races were just impossibly hard without having fully maxed driving skill and access to a DLC car which made all of them really easy. The biggest one was the stunt markers though, there are 39 of them and they are all apparently really difficult to get to and as such there are lots of videos where people work as a team to co-op and throw the cars through the rings. It’s actually not as difficult as the videos made out which shows that when a game is old enough, people will find convoluted ways of doing things for the sake of it.

Downloadable Content

As mentioned above, there is DLC and there are two packs to download – the free for all pack which introduces two achievements, and the Getting Busy pack which has the car I mentioned above and also some more achievements for dicking around in cars.

The achievements for the Free for All pack are both frustrating. You have to complete all of the missions again in time trail mode on the hardest difficulty and you know how much I love doing things twice so that can suck my balls. The other one is worse as it requires you to collect and impound a certain amount of cars... but if you’ve already killed all the gangs then some of these won’t appear anymore so you need to respawn the gangs in order to get them. Also a lot of the cars look the same and you are supposed to get a message telling you whether or not the car you are in can be impounded or not but for me, this didn’t come up straight away and instead it would tell me which bullshit song was playing – information I didn’t need or ask for.

The Getting Busy Bonus Pack, aside from having a really stupid name, introduces another five achievements. One of these was a co-op one for completing a stockpile mini-game which we did as part of our co-op playthrough. There are another two for doing silly shit like pinning five people to a car with a harpoon gun and doing three flips in a vehicle.

The last two are for completing the Street Races introduced by the DLC. There are 36 of them over 6 courses and most are pretty much impossible to win normally. What you have to do, and I think they designed the game this way, is start the race, go back to the agency headquarters – without a map – get the agency Supercar which is one of only three cars you can select on the street race mode, drive it back to race and park it just passed the start line. Now if you restart the race, the supercar will be there and you should be able to actually win the races.

This is massively time consuming and in my opinion, redundant. Why would you want to do street races in Crackdown? An open world, free roam third-person shooter that’s own game mechanics makes the use of cars redundant. This isn’t real racing so what’s the point?

As I said earlier, Crackdown has not aged well and the main difficulty of the game is battling with the archaic controls. I certainly won’t be entertaining the sequels any time soon.