Game Reviews
Review: Crackdown 2
By Sean Booker July 30, 2010 - 13:03
Studios: Ruffian Games
Rating: M
Genre: Third-Person Shooter
Platform: Xbox 360
Players: 1 (2-4 online co-op)
Crackdown 2 is an
open world shooter that gives the player super human powers while they fight
crime and kill freaks. Though each core element of the game works fine on its
own, the similarities to the original Crackdown
are far too massive. It’s this fact alone that causes Crackdown 2 to feel quite shallow despite all the fun to be had.
The game is set ten years after the original Crackdown, and has you playing as a new
agent from The Agency. Your goal is to assist The Agency in fighting and
cleansing Pacific City from the enemy group known as the Cell. Along with this,
Crackdown 2 features an all new day
and night cycle and the new enemy known as the freaks will spawn during the
latter portion to provide another type of enemy to suppress.
Like the first game, you are given super human abilities
that range from being able to lift and throw cars to jumping over skyscrapers. As
you progress through the game you will be able to level up your character in
several different ways. Killing enemies in hand to hand combat will increase
your strength and health, while blowing up and using explosives makes your
grenades more power and unlocks new weapons.
And of course, everyone’s favorite glowing collectables – the
agility orbs – return and continue to be incredibly fun to jump around the city
searching for. Along with the agility orbs, all new renegade type orbs and
online orbs are added. The renegade orbs add a bit more enjoyment to the hunt as
they tend to glide around the roof tops (or along the streets) in attempt to
run away from the player. Online orbs can only be collected when playing with
at least one other player.
For the majority of your time you will be hunting down enemy
strong holds in attempt to eliminate everyone in the area. Most of the enemies
are quite simple to kill and require only a few quick shots from any one of
your numerous guns. Though this shooting feels fine and is smooth enough to
pass, the targeting system is odd and quite needless. Holding down the left
trigger will cause you to lock on to your enemy and using the right stick
allows you to choose which part of their body you want to shoot at. Pressing up
on the stick locks on to the enemy’s head, while left or right targets either
arm. The game notes that shooting the arms can cause the enemies’ reload time
to be reduced but this ends up being useless considering a head shot kills them
faster. What adds to this is the fact that combining different targeted attacks
or aiming at specific body parts doesn’t reward the player with addition gun
experience points. Never did I feel the need to shoot out the opponent’s arm
because targeting their head allowed me to make the battles run much quicker
and more fluidly.
Though the gun play can be pretty easy to learn, and you’ll
easily be able to hold off an army of men, the mission objects you’re faced
with will become extremely repetitive. You’re going to be focusing on two main
objectives: cell strongholds and beacons. Cell strongholds aren’t required to
complete but they task you with wiping out an entire cell controlled area in
order to lower the number of enemies occupying a certain space. These can be
useful to take on since you’ll find the enemy can be quite trigger-happy even
when you’re just running by.
The main objective is reestablishing beacons set up by The
Agency. These are similar to strongholds in which there are a ton of enemies
around that must be taken care of. When enough are wiped out, you can activate
the beacon by standing in close proximity to it for a set length of time. The
time is shortened if you have a team with you that are all located within the
beacons radius. This makes for a fun king of the hill type mission against the
enemy cell but becomes quite tedious when you’re doing it for your sixteenth
time in a row. For the most part in Crackdown
2, you’ll find yourself running into an enemy base and having to stay there
long enough, or kill enough enemies before leaving. This works out at first but
you’ll soon realize that you’re basically doing the same mission over and over.
However, the one good feature is the online co-op. The first
Crackdown suffered from a broken and
almost unplayable online mode and Crackdown
2 fixes this. Though, it should be noted that only the host gets story
progression when playing with a friend so the only benefit to playing with
someone else is increasing your level and finding more orbs – two things you
can easily do by yourself offline.
Along with this, Crackdown
2 features some competitive multiplayer modes. Most are standard modes such
as king of the hill and deathmatch. One downside is that the abilities and
levels for your online agent are separate from your campaign, so nothing
carries over. Despite the competitive aspect working out quite nicely, the idea
of starting another agent from scratch when I already had a maxed out character
elsewhere was a huge turn off.
An important thing to remember though is just how similar
this game is when put beside its predecessor. It’s almost depressing just how
similar these two games are and makes you really wonder what Ruffian was doing
all this time considering the product. A lot of the animations are the same
and, apart from the broken down and destroyed variations, the city is also set
up just as it was before. You’re even doing the exact same type of missions.
Apart from a bit of streamlining and some fixes, such as reworking the
vehicles, you’re looking at a shinier Crackdown
1.
This isn’t to say Crackdown
2 isn’t fun. The leveling of your abilities is great throughout the game
and will cause you to utilize each of your agent’s techniques. Along with this,
the constant unlocking of new vehicles and equipment allows you more freedom in
how you want to battle the constant waves of Cell or the freaks. Agility Orb
hunting continues to be a great addition and with over 500 orbs to collect
throughout the city, I found myself spending hours just jumping from rooftop to
rooftop. Anyone who is into collectibles will enjoy this immensely. Though the missions
do become quite repetitive, there are a small number side tasks – like rooftop
races or vehicle stunt rings – to place in between the repetitive campaign. If
you really enjoyed the first game, you’ll have great time with the second.
When it comes to my recommendation, I mark it as a pass.
This is only because it is far too similar to the original game with not enough
new and important changes. If you haven’t played the first, I still can’t
recommend it since the first Crackdown
can be bought for around $20 right now; whereas Crackdown 2 runs at full retail price. However, I can see this game
hitting discount bins quite early and if you come across a $30-$40 price point,
I recommend you pick it up.