*Post-Play* Crackdown

As posted in my previous blog, I noticed this game on a recent trip down to GameStop and thought I'd pick it up.  Originally I played this at a friend's house long, long ago, and enjoyed it quite a bit; never followed up on it since I never had an XBOX until years later. When I first started playing, I noticed how heavily the game borrowed from elements of Grand Theft Auto such as the targeting system, the sandbox like cities, and the ability to commandeer vehicles through theft or picking them up from a dealer. Turns out that my suspection of the game borrowing from GTA was true afterall, being that Realtime Worlds' founder, David Jones, was also the creator of the Grand Theft Auto series.

When you start up the game, the menu just wreaks of old XBOX, but don't let the menu fool you... the game itself is fantastic. The basic story of the game is that there are 4 different islands, 3 of which are over-run by their respective gangs: Los Muertos, The Volk, and Shai-Gen Corporation. Your job is to wipe out all 21 of their gang leaders, then wipe out the top leader in order to clean up each faction of the city.

There are different online options for the game, such as your friends or even random people can join in your game at any time (with your approval) and help you fight off the gangs or help you do missions; even simultaneously.


The game, you basically play as a super soldier in the future and have 5 traits that you can level up and "evolve" as the game progresses.

Agility
This trait helps you run and jump, this trait is enhanced by finding upwards of 500 Agility Orbs hidden on rooftops or by doing rooftop races. This is by far one of the easiest traits to level up due to the fact that you're running and jumping around constantly, and it's way too hard to avoid glowing orbs.... hah!

Driving
Driving is a trait that I guarantee you won't level up to max unless you aim for it. You can drive and steal cars just like in any Grand Theft Auto game, but when you're given super speed and super jumping, along with the ability to warp to ammo stations, it is extremely unlikely that cars will be an asset to you. The only way to level this up is to do tricks in your car and to run over gang members, but still pretty useless IMO.

Explosives
Fuck yes. You have Grenades of several different types, depending on what you stock up on. The more enemies you kill with grenades the higher your skill increases, it's so fun to blow shit up.

Fighting
You kick someone, they fuckin FLY. The more you kick, the higher this goes....fuck yeah. The stronger you get, the bigger object you can pick up too. You start out only being able to pick up people, but the higher level you get your fighting skill you can eventually pick up cars or even larger objects to throw at your enemies.

Guns
Self explanatory. Aim, shoot, die. Level up. The only difference with levels seems to be the accuracy and how long it takes to reload, but other than that it's just run and gun.



To my surprise, the game does end with quite a twist that I wasn't expecting what so ever. So this makes me want to play Crackdown 2 even more to see what exactly the story is about.