I don't remember this being super profound back when I played it in 2013. Like we already knew Call of Duty was bad and secretly funded by the US government to promote the military industrial complex, and Spec Ops doesn't even go that far. And sure, there's that bit about like, hey man, YOU did that war crime. You could just like, stop playing. Ok, but you charged me money for this video game, so I'm going to play it, even if I don't agree with the character's decision. I'm not the main character in the video game. You wrote the main character. You did that.

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.