Progressively gaining the ability to jump higher and run faster is especially fun when you can storm a heavily fortified base and b-line directly to kick the head boss off a building that used to seem impossible. HOWEVER, that's not enough to save this from being an overall tedious experience. If you've played a sandbox game with cheats you've played a better version of this, simply slapping a cel shader on everything doesn't hide how bland this world and characters are. The limited arsenal also feels like a missed opportunity. This only started being fun literally at the very end when I was all powered up, meanwhile most of the game is spent trying to find a way onto a building and looking for orbs to hopefully make the game more fun.

I played crackdown way back when on my xbox 360, and guess what? I didn't play it to get into the halo 3 beta, so all you fucking little virgins, little ass, fuckin, NOT REAL CRACKDOWN FANS, ok, you can all buzz off. This review is for REAL Crackdown 1 fans only!!!

In Crackdown 1 you play as a cop. This means you can shoot pedestrians, run over criminals without reading them their rights, and scale buildings at incredible speeds to collect green orbs. That last bit is the best part of the game. It's a scathing critique of police work in general - collecting the green orbs is comparably enjoyable to shooting up heroin, but the only way you the Player can collect the green heroin orbs is by playing as a cop. The more you play, the more your cop's power grows, and the more green orbs you require to level up your jumping skill (get high). It's a viscous cycle that reflects our own reality - as the player's need for brain chemical releases grows, so too does the power of the police. This leaves us with a rather dystopian world, a place where freedom has been crushed under the totalitarian boot of the Cop, where pleasure is only given to those who help grow the Cop Machine.

The shooting in this game is also kind of weird, like I get why they had a lock on system but it never felt very good.

When Crackdown first released it was an interesting take on the 3rd-person shooter with platforming and rpg mechanics. Now it feels like at one of the earlier attempts of a 3D rogue-lite with the ability to go take on whatever boss you want in whatever order with you learning more and more with each attempt. The leveling-up system for your guns, driving and platforming are really cool and running and jumping around the large city was entertaining back when we still didn't have a lot of open-world superhero games, but the lack of any realy plot or characters can make the game feel mildly entertaining at the best of times and dull and tedious at its worst.

Took me 3 or 4 times restarting this game to finally sit all the way through it. It ended up being a memorable experience absolutely though.

Crackdown isn't really much of anything special aside from it's super powers, the feeling it's open world brings to the table isn't anything that wasn't already done with the early 3D GTA games at the start of the previous generation. It also harkens back to some of the Spider Man games of that prior era in giving new approaches to getting around the world. But in turn it lacks some of the unique identity both those series had in their stories and worlds. There's nothing very unique or alive or remotely interesting about the crime addled world Crackdown just throws you in to. The hardware advances of PS3/360 era really saw a rush of games centered on superpowers and open worlds and Crackdown probably lacks the most individual identity in this entire genre.

With that said, there doesn't much need to be. What Crackdown lacks in identity and tone, it makes up for in the fun of actually playing it and the honestly astonishingly good sense of player progression it has. Crackdown isn't some nuanced super power story, nor does it have any kind of unique gimmick to be had in it's approach to it's power system. It is really just a straightforward generic sandbox filled with enemies for you to kill and obstacles to surmount so you can get stronger and better at the game at your leisure.

Rarely in a game, especially in that era, have I enjoyed the sense of climbing buildings to get some collectable. But in Crackdown those collectables were tied to the progression of making your character better at climbing and jumping. Eventually running faster than a supercar and leaping to the tops of buildings in a single jump is it's own reward. Effortlessly throwing semi trucks makes all the effort of drop kicking endless boring goons over and over worth it.

It would almost be one of the more forgettable games I've ever experienced, but there really was just a sense of fun there that I eventually latched on to that gives me pretty great memories of playing it back then despite it's generic shortcomings.