Crackdown 2 (Xbox 360)

The original Crackdown saw you playing as a superpowered member of The Agency, weeding out organized crime in Pacific City with a very heavy hand. While all the crime bosses were taken down, there was plenty of collateral from unleashing genetically engineered law enforcement to achieve victory by any means necessary. Crackdown 2 shows us the results of that careless crackdown on crime, Pacific City now even worse off than before. The seemingly small moment of letting mutated freaks out of an illegal laboratory in the first game has lead to them proliferating and clogging the streets at night where they hunt down any human they see. Major businesses have been reduced to rubble and people now live in shantytowns on the edge of the city. A new criminal group known as Cell has risen up to start violently taking over parts of the city as well. Now, the Agency once again deploys some superpowered agents to try and deal with the problems it helped create.

 

Crackdown 2 does hide some of the truth behind the situation in Pacific City in audio recordings across its open world map, this action shooter perhaps doing too good a job of making you trust in the Agency by hiding the truths of its duplicity behind collectibles that aren’t always easy to come across. However, you can at least take some comfort knowing that the Freaks definitely need dealing with and Cell’s own violent rebellion definitely seems to take things a step too far. Crackdown 2 does mostly focus on laying out a spread of objectives across the three islands comprising Pacific City for you to tackle in the order you please, although marking them all on your map from the get-go does perhaps remove some of the reason to explore the city itself. Your mini-map funnily enough is actually really bad at displaying where the nearest objective is though, this not exactly the best way to encourage players to travel across the city using their incredible agility and climbing skills. The voice of the Agency that tells you what to do and reacts to your actions is as fun as ever though, and in fact, the usually official sounding character is now more willing to joke around or be a bit indulgent. He’ll sound amused when you end up on fire or excited by your successes, and while he is perhaps too quick to comment on things, he provides enough laughs to make up for sometimes giving you the same tutorials you’ve heard before.

Crackdown 2 brings over most of the gameplay ideas from the first game, your agent’s superhuman abilities more about good movement and passive increases to their weapon handling than anything absurd like flight or laser vision. While your fresh new agent here will start with only mildly better strength and durability than most, over time you’ll gradually grow so you can leap across rooftops or even spring onto small buildings from ground level. Most buildings have plenty of ledges to grab so you can even scale a skyscraper eventually if you can find suitable handholds, this expanding how you can maneuver around the city and approach battles. Crackdown 2 is able to place enemies at varying elevations to fire on you because you will eventually have the power needed to easily reach their perches and fight back, although the aiming is also very accommodating. For the most part, you just need to hold down left trigger to lock on to the foe you’re facing and you can fire rather accurately. Your gun can determine how useful this is, an automatic will wear foes down quickly but require sustained pressure to finish the job, shotguns are mostly for foes in a certain range, and rocket launchers can send a powerful explosive out but the enemy has time to flee if they see it coming. Use of your weapons will increase how effective they are as well, the skill passively increasing with each successful kill but taking quite a while to build up to where you get the competency increases. You can even get in there and knock enemies around physically, your increasing punching skill not only making your tougher, but you get additional health meters for investing in it and can start doing things like lifting and throwing cars as your reward for diversifying your battle approach.

 

Since the basics of Crackdown haven’t been altered too much in the sequel, it does seem like this will be more of the enjoyable city-crossing action that made the first game exciting. However, the shift in the mission types has done the formula a bit of a disservice. Freaks are an abundant and sadly not all that difficult enemy to contend with. They come in great numbers, but individual ones fold to very little pressure. Their abundance doesn’t give them the necessary edge to be troubling to face, although the game does slowly roll out some variants. While most are just mutated humans that try to run up and attack you, you eventually get explosive ones, acid spitters, and much larger ones who take quite a bit of firepower to wear down. Even the biggest Freaks aren’t used to the best effect though, mostly because of the mission structure for this half of your “peace-keeping” work. Taking out the Freaks mostly involves finding Absorption Units which are often atop tall structures and lightly guarded. Once you’ve activated enough, they’ll deploy a Sunburst bomb to wipe out the Freaks in an area, but you need to defend the Sunburst since the Freaks will attack it in force. The Absorption Units are often so weakly defended they feel like busywork, but defending the Sunburst also feels a bit too straightforward since not enough of the Freaks are going to be strong enough to make you work for it. There are also emergence points around the city where Freaks come out of a hole in the ground you need to plug up again, but once more, the threat level is too low and they don’t come in high enough numbers to threaten you much.

The Freaks definitely let down Crackdown 2 despite technically being a major focus, but luckily they’re not all it has. Cell is where you’re more likely to have interesting battles that make some decent use of the city to vary up the fights. Cell strongholds can be converted into tactical locations for the Agency where you can call in vehicles or ammo refills freely, but first you must take out a certain amount of enemy resistance in that area. Once you start a takeover, Cell will often have its force come out of the woodwork and hit rather hard. Armed with weapons similar to your own, Cell isn’t afraid to bombard you with heavy artillery the further you get into the adventure. Many late game Cell skirmishes will involve you trying to survive rocket launcher salvos from many angles, the player not able to fight them as sloppily as they could the less difficult Freaks. It does feel like Pacific City has lost many of its most exciting areas for conflict in the first game though, the ruins of old places often not that great for fights and the places still standing not providing as many layered battle arenas. Fighting outside might involve the nearby city block but it’s often a chaotic fracas rather than something with greater room for unconventional approaches or unique battle types. Cell does give you more substance in the action than Freak clearing activities, but Pacific City isn’t holding up as a setting too well and only occasionally will it put forward an area with a layout that really complements the gunfights.

 

Funnily enough, Crackdown 2 tries to redeem the weak vehicles from the first game a touch, putting some quality licensed music on its radios and making it easier to get one when you want one, only for them to feel even less necessary. Since all your objectives are marked on the map and you can fast travel to spots around the map via extraction, there’s not too much reason to drive around. There can be reason to go on foot still, buildings and tough to reach places often containing hidden orbs that give you points to all abilities or agility orbs that are vital for getting those superhuman leaps that can lead to very mobile firefights. A helicopter is now available though and easy to get at tactical points once Cell has been cleared away, the helicopter able to help you reach high areas to help skip some of the tougher climbing for things like Absorption Units that make that part even less interesting should you embrace this tool. Helicopters are a bit fragile, but not enough to discourage their use, although shooting things with them is rough so it is just the navigational boost that makes them perhaps too good to give out so freely. It’s still likely best to get around on foot until you need to extract since an area is clear of objectives, but it also means that the vehicle races once again feel tacked on rather than a natural evolution of a familiar component of this third-person shooter.

 

Being able to play the campaign with up to three other players can lead to some enjoyable carnage although it will likely be even less challenging than going solo. Multiplayer in general has been expanded though, including a slew of competitive multiplayer modes. Mobility definitely gets to shine a good bit in the smaller battle maps that are pretty conducive to getting out of trouble or getting interesting angles on opponents. The aiming is still dependent on lock-on but you have full health and shields, the game allowing you to recover should you avoid injury for a bit which can give you good reason to disengage rather than testing whose lock-on is stronger. It can feel a bit light because of everyone springing around rather than playing too tactically or valuing their life much, but it feels appropriate for Crackdown 2 since that’s fairly close to how you handle threats in single player. The free Deluge DLC is much more interesting though, a co-operative mode where you and a few friends can try to outscore each other while wiping out huge groups of enemies across the city. Deluge gives you all the power you could want, even rocket boots, and lets you blast your way through Freaks and gunmen with ease, the focus on being quick about it and making good use of the heavy firepower you can pick up after each wave. The city-wide Deluge tours can take about an hour to clear but definitely scale up in how dangerous the opposition is, some of that liberal rocket launcher usage from the campaign returning and still providing its ridiculous thrill as you are facing foes who have to whip out such incredible firepower to keep up with your superpowered agent.

THE VERDICT: Crackdown 2 shines when it’s carrying on ideas from the original game and stumbles when it’s asked to come up with something new. The Freaks are a very poor enemy and not even that threatening after they get their more powerful variants, and while firefights with the Cell do provide more interesting engagements, they don’t provide much fertile ground for your superpowered agent to make great use of his skills. The city can still be a playground of sorts, leaping around to collect orbs and find work that needs doing, and multiplayer both cooperative and competitive gives some more life to the experience, but the missions don’t test you the best so the simple thrill of being overpowered ends up behind most of the best moments Crackdown 2 offers.

 

And so, I give Crackdown 2 for Xbox 360…

An OKAY rating. Crackdown 2 could have just offered more crime bosses in new locations and it would have probably been just as fun as the original. That feeling of exploring the city, collecting orbs and improving your abilities along the way, and eventually stumbling into a more structured battle with multiple approaches feels like it made great use of the skills of your genetically modified agent in Crackdown 1. The Freaks are just underwhelming though, not fighting with much intelligence or placed in interesting locations most of the time. Cell is left with the locations that weren’t left in tatters after the first adventure and do get a few accommodating areas to put up good fights in, but they don’t feel like they’re built for their purpose as well as they should be. Crackdown 2 isn’t immediately after the first game in terms of its in-game timeframe, new places could have been built to provide some more compelling firefights with some flow to them or considerations beyond wiping out whatever enemies you can see. There is an entertaining shooter design still flowing through Crackdown 2’s veins and it gets to shine in situations like multiplayer, the mission objectives just didn’t bring enough to the table to let it thrive this time around. This mixed bag isn’t a bore at least, but those Freak missions definitely needed the counterbalance of taking down Cell’s strongholds since they contribute so little on their own.

 

Crackdown 2 should be judged on its own merits; it’s very easy to just want this to be more Crackdown 1 rather than a sequel with its own ideas. However, Crackdown 2 can’t seem to gel some of its new ideas with the old ones, meaning when you’re enjoying the game, it’s often on the back of what wasn’t altered too much. While it was underwhelming in the original when you free the Freaks and they’re barely noticeable, the fact they’re still barely much of a concern here despite being the main threat really feels like a missed direction. They’re treated like generic zombies to mow down without much thought, something that doesn’t jive with what your abilities allow. A greater focus on Cell rather than the blander threat could have helped Crackdown 2 make better use of its fighting and movement systems, but it can at least be a game where you turn your brain off and blast things away. It just doesn’t provide consistent thrills as well as the game that came before it.