Superheroes!
Well, more like antiheroes, there’s a whole Judge Dredd thing happening here, “clean up the festering pit of evil that is your city” vibe.
It’s a strange little game, and it’s a great game, but it’s only about half a game, which is understandable, since they tried to shoehorn in bits from platforming, driving, shooting, nearly every goddamn genre.
Which, okay, fine. Grand Theft Auto did the same thing, and this game wishes it could be that good, but we’re looking at fundamentally different design philosophies. Consider a bit of Remedial GTA, right? GTA is… well, kinda hard to describe, but it’s more of an interactive movie than anything else - the plot (which is pretty damn good, for a game, and interesting in its own right) is just a vehicle to drive the player into action set-pieces. However! Everything about GTA is designed to make you identify with your avatar. RPG stat-building, paper-doll stuff like clothing and tattoos and cars and a physique that is contingent on said stats, properties, girlfriends, context-sensitive narration, all that good stuff is what draws you in, what makes you develop an emotional investment in your character and the way he interacts with the world. The sandbox stuff, the free-roaming aspect of it is so good because it gives the player the illusion of even more control. The ability to progress through the game’s plot at your own pace, and with a reasonable degree of control over the order of missions, is another layer of “this is my world”, and if you go completely sandbox and drop the plot altogether, there’s still an unbelievable amount of crap you can do and see and usually blow up.
Crackdown, meanwhile, lacks, well, quite a lot of that stuff, but in a word it lacks soul. There’s no plot to speak of, no character narrative interaction or progression. I mean, you could take the view that the form is a reflection of the content, that since the vibe here is that you’re a vat-grown instrument of heavy-caliber justice who knows Only War, then civilians are just impediments, right? There’s nothing but your gun and your car and a voice in your head driving you to kill faster better harder, to deal out death and mayhem efficiently. There is no reason for an engineered one man death-squad to think or grow or do anything that doesn’t involve something else dying in as picturesque a manner as possible. Fair enough, and the narrator (the voice of the Agency, your link to command and intelligence) is a great device here, it’s a great way to enhance the humor - and there is humor - inherent in blowing shit up real good. But if you’re going to go this way, if you’re going to make it all about the killing, if there’s no plot and no exploration and no little side quests or easter eggs, then the core gameplay better be real good.
And it is! Almost!
It’s… well, it’s a half-Microsoft game, you know? So we’re looking at, like, competence, with occasional flashes of brilliance, but on the whole it just leaves you wanting more, and usually not in the “HOLY CRAP I NEVER WANT THIS TO END” way, but rather like “This would be so awesome if it weren’t broken in this small but crucial way!” way.
Weapons, f’rinstance. The guns are pretty cool (although sniping is pretty pointless in this kind of game), but the targeting system requires you to get the reticule right on a guy before you can lock onto him, and there’s no way to switch targets, you’ve got to drop the lock and reaquire a new one manually, which kind of sucks in a big firefight. Vehicles are limited. There’s only cars, and they all suck ass except for the three Agency vehicles, so thank god those are so good. Once you level the SUV up enough to adhere to surfaces, it becomes this unnatural hybrid of Hulk and Tony Hawk, you get into this groove of slow-motion preplanned charged barrel-roll jumps into a wallgrind, upside-down into a cornice and chargejumping back into an inverted Mario-stomp on a pack of very surprised post-Soviet grenadiers, which is pretty cool when you realize you just did that shit with a three-ton monster truck.
The melee is interesting - not the basic - actually, only - melee move, which is just a kick, but all the throwing of stuff, or indeed seeing a car full of bad guys screech up next to you, and then just kicking the living shit out of that car, using it as a gigantic soccer ball to flatten more bad guys and eventually blowing it up and incinerating the guys still inside it, all with your damn feet.
There are moments, okay? There are indeed perfect moments here, little Zen slices of timeless balance wherein every atom of this little pocket universe spins in perfect unison, like when you send a spread of rockets and cluster grenades down into a twelve-car pileup of well-dressed shotgun-toting Yakuza, turning every automobile in a one-block radius into a glorious demonstration of escape velocity, and a big rig comes crashing down landing directly on its nose and slowly, inevitably, succumbs to gravity, squashing the single pedestrian who managed to survive the previous inferno while the heavens rain down purest joy made manifest in the form of twisted, shattered carcasses both human and vehicular.
