Prepare To Be Reviewed

Straight from his home office to your living room or bedroom, it’s Jaeger’s review of

CRACKDOWN
By Realtime Worlds
For the XBOX 360

Crackdown is a third person “sandbox style” shooter in which you play a genetically engineered Super Agent out to wipe the streets clean of its organized crime problem.

The game has a great open-endedness to it that allows the player to do whatever missions they feel like, in whatever order they like without the wretched tediousness of getting “locked in” to a particular playing pattern. If you the player want to go after a Gang Kingpin, you can, or if all you want to do is stand on a rooftop and blow gang members into fiery, meaty, chunks with a rocket launcher, well you can do that too, and believe me that is a lot of fun unto itself.

Leveling up is fun and fairly easy at the start and works like this: The more baddies you shoot, the better your aim and kill power becomes, the more gang bangers you curb-stomp, the stronger you become, eventually becoming strong enough to pick up HUGE shit like trucks, shipping containers etc. to use in pulverizing your enemies.

The AI is surprisingly smart too, so use of weapons and cover is crucial once the player reaches the last couple of Kingpins. The game also contains a little feature that I’m quite fond of that is missing in many other games (Legend of Jack Sparrow, I’m looking at you): the ability to save your progress without having to piss around finding checkpoints, or finish a mission, or any of that other horse shit so prevalent in games today. For this feature alone I should give the game a five out of five!

The only downside to the game is when executing certain maneuvers it’s too easy to get “caught in the camera angles” and find your character getting cut to pieces by enemy fire before you have a chance to “find yourself.” But this isn’t so much a problem specific to this game (I have the same problem sometimes with Lost Planet) but a problem with the industry in general, and how artists and coders can’t seem to get in-game camera movement just right.

Anyway, this game rocks. Go get it. Now!

Five (Armor Agent, armor!) out of Five.