It gets your adrenaline pumping and lets you see things you could never see in reality. It keeps you looking for bigger highs, seeking even more insane and dangerous ways to get your heart pumping and score more in the process. It only gets better when you have friends to share it with, because you can do more dangerous and insane things together.
Mostly, these dangerous activities involve blowing things up and grabbing out-of-reach agility orbs to boost your agility level.
""Crackdown,"" the latest open-world game from Real Time Worlds for the Xbox 360, manages to unify the free-roaming destruction familiar to ""Grand Theft Auto"" fans with the highly addictive orb-grabbing game play.
The plot is serviceable to justify explosions and orb hunting. You are a superhuman cop working for ""The Agency,"" a police force tasked with reclaiming Pacific City from the three gangs controlling the city. Naturally, you do this by ""strategically"" clobbering the ever-living crap out of any and all gang members you see—working your way up the hierarchy until you can take on its head honcho.
The hook here is the ""super cop"" angle. Based on how you choose to dispatch gang members and bosses, your basic skills evolve to higher and higher levels. Figuring out the best way to heighten your agility, bolster your strength and power up your ""justice delivery ordinances"" is incredibly addictive. Jumping building-to-building trying to find more ""orbs"" to heighten your leap, and gang members on whom to test out your rocket launcher, become an obsession for hours on end.
Anyone who remembers ""The Tick"" and his leaping building-to-building can live out their fantasies through the game's level design, with buildings stretching high into the sky and providing a huge vertical environment to explore as you hop to higher and higher heights looking for crime and orbs. Unfortunately, this vertical style leads to some camera problems in tight places. Nothing is more confusing than trying to leap between two buildings 30 stories up while the camera spins around you wildly.
The most impressive graphical element is the explosions, which bloom like beautiful flowers of destruction. After all, any solid action game has to nail the explosions, and in this case, they billow into the sky with frightening accuracy. This is largely due to a spot-on physics engine in the game, which keeps cars and flaming bodies of gang members flying from their explosive source in stunningly realistic patterns.
Although the addictive nature of the basic game play and the raw thrills of being a super cop offer some great game experiences, ultimately the high is short lived. The basic game can be completed in less than eight hours. More fun can be found when you play online with a friend over Xbox Live, where emergent game play—like playing catch with economy cars can keep you busy for a while—but sometimes buggy online play can ruin the fun.
Ultimately, the explosions can only get so big, and gamers will move on to the next big thrill.
