All of the elements of gameplay blend excellently, providing you with a cool looking comic-booky sci-fi world to literally play around in. But I would not be doing my job if I didn't call out the storyline as one of the most rewarding elements of Crackdown. I know, you wouldn't expect a free-roaming shoot 'em up to also pack a riveting Brave New World plot (and, admittedly, Crackdown borrows more from Robocop than any high-brow literature), but it's honestly one of the game's best features. I can't go into too much detail because I don't want to spoil anything, but suffice it to say that Crackdown takes an intriguing and probing look at just what happens when cops become superhuman and don't have to follow the usual rules. In a world where the Miranda Warning (you know, the little speech the police have to give when they take someone into custody?) is stenciled on the warheads in your rocket launcher, the world becomes a really exciting place… and a very scary place as well. Crackdown doesn't flinch from illustrating the results of martial law through superior firepower, but it does it in a tongue-in-cheek way that is both hilarious and a little terrifying all at the same time. By the end of the single-player campaign, I was honestly not sure what I'd become once all the killing was through… was I a hero or just the new under-boss?
The addition of cooperative multiplayer is nice, but given the agile nature of your Crackdown character the action can get tough to follow. I believe my fellow editor Patrick Joynt said it best, "Following Sterling around last night was like trying to follow some kind of super-powered spider monkey." The multiplayer difficulty level scales nicely, but if you're playing at the Tough setting, seasoned players may find it a little too easy (don't worry, you can dial the challenge up to impossible proportions if you want). Still, once you've completed the campaign, there's not a whole lot to do cooperatively, so there's not as much longevity in the multiplayer as a game featuring competitive modes.
I'm not going to lie to you, I have to play a lot of games at this job, so when I tell you that I'd rather play Crackdown than just about anything else on my 360, I hope that carries as much weight as I intend. Granted, I don't expect this game to monopolize my time for more than a month, due to the fact that once you've killed all the bosses your only goals are earning the wacky Achievements like keeping a body in the air for an absurd amount of time (hint: use the heat-seeking rocket launcher to air juggle). But a month is a decent life for a game like Crackdown, and more than enough time before the next big game swoops down to steal my 360 away again (Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 for example). Notice that I didn't mention the Halo 3 beta offer during this whole articles That's because it's completely irrelevant when looking at Crackdown, it's a solid game that delivers exactly what it promises: a giant sandbox to blow the crap out of.
