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A Crackdown Fan Reviews Crackdown 2. (gasp) CRACKDOWN 2!

My Crackdown 2 review by Cam (aged 35)

To nobody’s great surprise I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Crackdown 2 in those horrible, cold hours that are the time I am not playing Crackdown 2. It wasn’t until Ravi forced me to explain my rabid defence of the game that I was able to really wrap my head around how I feel about the game. And it is thus:

Crackdown 2 magnificently succeeds in the areas that are the most important to me. Thus, to me, it is an absolutely incredible game.

All I wanted, at the end of the day, was more Crackdown. Now for different people more crackdown means a lot of different things. All I wanted was jumping off buildings, COLLECTING ORBS, and blowing people up with a homing missile. That’s it. To me, Crackdown is the never ending joy of finding an enemy, jumping, pressing LT to lock on and, while you’re still in mid air, pressing RT and watching the enemy blow up real good like. I swear I have a Povolv-ian reaction to this, just sitting there like an idiot drooling doing it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And then to top it off I jump off a building and get vertigo and land SO HARD on the ground that NEARBY CARS EXPLODE.

That’s Crackdown to me. Crackdown 2 has more of that. Therefore it’s great.

Crackdown (left) compared with Crackdown 2 (right)

For the life of me I couldn’t understand the backlash. It’s bad because it’s more of the same, but different? Who the hell complains about following up the best steak you’ve ever had in your life with ANOTHER STEAK BUT THIS TIME WITH EXTRA SHRIMP IN THE MIDDLE OF IT?

I have to admit Ravi had a point. For a lot of people ‘more Crackdown’ is about watching different factions fight each other for control of a city, or it’s about watching a working, vibrant city that is desperately trying to cling onto normality getting screwed up by crime. Some people spent most of their time in the vehicles, which I never really was interested in. And…OK, I’ll admit, Crackdown 2 doesn’t have that. The visually unique areas are replaced with a uniform desolation, and because everywhere is so broken you can’t enjoy being anywhere as much. I thought the Peacekeepers, Cell and Freaks would be the three factions that fight each other, but they’re all just everywhere and you never get the sense you’re in Freak territory or whatever. Everywhere is the same as everywhere else really, and that’s a shame. The city isn’t what it used to be.

I kind of miss it.

But, like everything else in life I miss, I try not to think about it and just play more Crackdown 2 and start grinning like a God damn lunatic again.

Editor’s Note: A less mentally unstable review of Crackdown 2 is coming in a few weeks