Crackdown 2 Review
By: |
August 19, 2010, 10:55 pm
GameXplain reviews single player and multiplayer separately
Who would have thought the life of a genetically enhanced super soldier would be so dull?
The first Crackdown was largely an anomaly. It was a semi-anticipated game that skyrocketed to the upper echelons of gaming popularity in large part due to the Halo 3 beta that came included with the product. Crackdown 2 is no less an anomaly. It's a full retail game that carries a $60 price tag, but has an amount of new content more akin to an expansion pack than a full retail title. The game takes place in the same exact city as the first game, but has a different mission structure this time around.
Nevertheless, I'm sure Microsoft Game Studios and Ruffian Games had a tough decision when deciding how to package this product. Would the addition of 4-player co-op, several new mission types, and some competitive online multiplayer modes be enough to overshadow the game's shortcomings? After spending some considerable time with the title, I’m going to have to lean firmly in the direction of ‘no.’
Nevertheless, I'm sure Microsoft Game Studios and Ruffian Games had a tough decision when deciding how to package this product. Would the addition of 4-player co-op, several new mission types, and some competitive online multiplayer modes be enough to overshadow the game's shortcomings? After spending some considerable time with the title, I’m going to have to lean firmly in the direction of ‘no.’
With Crackdown 2, Ruffian has managed to take a formula that almost worked, and muddled it up with a smattering of new additions. While the mission diversity is certainly appreciated this time around, there really isn't enough variation even among the different mission types to make this game all that playable. Essentially, every mission boils down to following the marker on your map, killing everything around the marker, and then stopping once the Agency Chief starts yelling at you about how great of a job you’re doing. These missions just keep getting repeated over and over, and really dragged down the experience for me.
The story of Crackdown 2 is almost entirely unnecessary. The game takes place 10 years after the first, and Pacific City has worked past its crime problem. Now, the citizens have moved on to bigger and badder dangers. A virus has broken out turning people into mindless mutants that crave destruction and human flesh. While the story is uninteresting, it's still far too prominently featured in the game. I don't care about the city's backstory, I just want to grab some orbs!
The story of Crackdown 2 is almost entirely unnecessary. The game takes place 10 years after the first, and Pacific City has worked past its crime problem. Now, the citizens have moved on to bigger and badder dangers. A virus has broken out turning people into mindless mutants that crave destruction and human flesh. While the story is uninteresting, it's still far too prominently featured in the game. I don't care about the city's backstory, I just want to grab some orbs!
The main story missions in the game consist of activating absorption units littered throughout Pacific City. Once a certain number of units have been activated in a given area, you can call in a beacon and eliminate the freak menace in that region. Unfortunately, the sheer number of Absorption Units and the ungodly repetition involved in activating the beacons makes working toward this goal sort of a drag. Fighting the freaks is hardly all that interesting, they simply swarm towards the Absorption Unit and attempt to destroy it while you kill them off one after the other.
Beyond these main missions, players can occupy their time with the various sidequests, including capturing tactical locations, sealing up freak breaches, performing vehicle stunts, engaging in races (both on foot and in vehicles), and of course collecting those delicious orbs.
That's right, remember in 2007 how those orbs ruled your life for several weeks, creeping up from your subconscious to haunt you even after the game was long done? Well, now they're back. All 800 of them. Except this time, there's an additional assortment of orbs that are online only.
I still maintain that the orb hunting is the most solidly conceived part of this game, and really could have been a full game in its own right. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop, scouring every inch of skyline for glowing green goodness may not be everyone's idea of a good time, but it most certainly is mine. Beyond that, I love the idea of leveling up your agility with these same orbs so that you can jump higher and grab more orbs in progressively harder to reach places.
What bogs the game down for the most part is all of the random distractions that kept me from focusing on my goal to snag every orb in Pacific City. None of the missions are all that fun to do (or even that challenging), so I was left feeling like I was simply going through the motions most of the time. All I wanted to do was look for more orbs, but in my attempts to actually beat the game, I had to give up on this quest and focus on those blasted Absorption Units.
Beyond these main missions, players can occupy their time with the various sidequests, including capturing tactical locations, sealing up freak breaches, performing vehicle stunts, engaging in races (both on foot and in vehicles), and of course collecting those delicious orbs.
That's right, remember in 2007 how those orbs ruled your life for several weeks, creeping up from your subconscious to haunt you even after the game was long done? Well, now they're back. All 800 of them. Except this time, there's an additional assortment of orbs that are online only.
I still maintain that the orb hunting is the most solidly conceived part of this game, and really could have been a full game in its own right. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop, scouring every inch of skyline for glowing green goodness may not be everyone's idea of a good time, but it most certainly is mine. Beyond that, I love the idea of leveling up your agility with these same orbs so that you can jump higher and grab more orbs in progressively harder to reach places.
What bogs the game down for the most part is all of the random distractions that kept me from focusing on my goal to snag every orb in Pacific City. None of the missions are all that fun to do (or even that challenging), so I was left feeling like I was simply going through the motions most of the time. All I wanted to do was look for more orbs, but in my attempts to actually beat the game, I had to give up on this quest and focus on those blasted Absorption Units.
Combat in Crackdown 2 is so mindless, it might as well not even be there. The target lock-on meant that all I found myself doing was hitting Left Trigger to lock on, then Right Trigger to kill the target, then Left Trigger again to move on to the next guy. Furthermore, enemies don't have any AI to speak of. They simply stand in place and shoot you in the face while you do the same to them until one of you is dead. This removes any weight or significance a given encounter might have had, since every enemy fights you in exactly the same manner. All of the fights in the game just sort of blur together.
The real problem with pretty much every aspect of Crackdown 2 -- from the art design, to the story, to the mission structure, to the combat itself -- is just how bland the game feels. While the first Crackdown was hardly the prettiest game, it still had a distinctive look and feel to it (mostly because of the cel-shading). Crackdown 2 has somehow downplayed this visual style from the first game to the point where you can hardly notice that that game employs any kind of special shading at all. While the design on the suit itself is somewhat cool, it all felt too much like generic badassery for me to take it seriously.
All of this brings me to my final issue with this game: The terribly conceived narration by the Agency Chief. Throughout my time with the game, he assaulted me with all manner of stupid quips, insults, directives, condemnations, and a general assortment of stupid crap I really didn't need to listen to. I have a hard time understanding why this character was even necessary in the game in the first place, much less why he needed to chew my ear off ceaselessly with his mildly offensive yet extremely annoying tirades about my actions. Most of the time, his comments weren't useful, or even accurate, making the whole thing more frustrating.
Ultimately, it's not like there isn't some fun to be found in Crackdown 2, and I'm sure people who loved the hell out of the first game will find plenty of enjoyment. As for me, I need more focus out of a game for it to be something I'll really love. While hunting down orbs can be a fun diversion, the fact that everything else I was expected to do in the game was so unrefined really got to me after a while. Nothing about the singleplayer portion of the game really convinced me that it needed to be released.
The multiplayer side of things is where the new additions to Crackdown 2 really become apparent. Players can take to the streets of Pacific City online with up to 3 other people to play through the co-op modes. As far as I can tell, the only real bonus of doing this is that you can snag the online-only orbs.
The game’s structure just seemed designed solely with single-player in mind, and other players really just serve to get in the way during a heated firefight. It was nice to be able to jump online and show off my leveled-up character (which did impress a random online buddy or two), but not nice enough to warrant playing that mode for all that long. I imagine that this would be more fun with friends rather than random people, as you could probably just spend time scouring the city for orbs and ignoring the mission structure entirely.
The game’s structure just seemed designed solely with single-player in mind, and other players really just serve to get in the way during a heated firefight. It was nice to be able to jump online and show off my leveled-up character (which did impress a random online buddy or two), but not nice enough to warrant playing that mode for all that long. I imagine that this would be more fun with friends rather than random people, as you could probably just spend time scouring the city for orbs and ignoring the mission structure entirely.
While the co-op mode has been expanded this time, the real multiplayer addition comes in the form of three different competitive modes: Rocket Tag, Deathmatch, and Team Deathmatch.
Rocket Tag arms all players with rocket launchers and designates one person as "it." The player who is "it" at any given time is the target for the leagues of rocket launcher-toting armored badasses in the match. Players are awarded points for either killing or damaging the "it" player, or by quickly snagging the "it" marker after disposing of an enemy. This is actually ridiculously hard to do, as the marker was constantly caught in a torrent of rocket fire. This mode does offer some fun, though it isn't particularly balanced fun. It’s incredibly hard to grab the “it” marker, and even when I managed to grab it, the whole thing just felt like dumb luck.
Deathmatch is a pretty self-explanatory mode. Players are plopped into an arena (each of which is ripped straight from the single-player campaign) and let loose on each other. This mode offered some fun, although again balancing seemed to be an issue. Matches are point based, and the difference in points from varying types of kills is hardly weighted fairly. You get ten points for killing an enemy with a weapon, forty points for killing them with a melee attack, and fifty for killing them with a ground slam attack. This meant that the real way to win any match was to lock onto a player, hunt them down and then ground slam next to them for the full fifty points. I can’t imagine game-winning players ever employing a different strategy than this.
Crackdown 2’s final multiplayer mode is Team Deathmatch, which functions exactly as you'd assume. Players are assigned teams and let out into the city to wreak havoc on one another. Yet again, the balancing issues seemed to pop up, as ground slamming enemies awards your team with five times what killing someone with a gun does. I'm sure that players will adapt to this and realize the limited efficacy of shooting enemies versus smashing them into bits, but until then, it seems pretty easy to pull way ahead with a few simple tricks.
All of this is to say that while Crackdown 2's multiplayer offerings are not entirely devoid of fun, they are extremely imbalanced and just not that well thought out. Co-op is probably the mode that the majority of players will spend time with, and even that feels mostly unnecessary. It’s not like I never enjoyed a single moment of the multiplayer modes, rather they just felt largely unrefined, and almost like an afterthought, despite being the main selling point of this sequel.
All of this is to say that while Crackdown 2's multiplayer offerings are not entirely devoid of fun, they are extremely imbalanced and just not that well thought out. Co-op is probably the mode that the majority of players will spend time with, and even that feels mostly unnecessary. It’s not like I never enjoyed a single moment of the multiplayer modes, rather they just felt largely unrefined, and almost like an afterthought, despite being the main selling point of this sequel.
Just The Facts
Boxart
Developer: Ruffian Games
Genre: Action-Adventure
Available On: Xbox 360
Background Check: Micah
I traditionally do not like open-world games. Every once in a while, I will find myself enjoying one pretty intensely (Red Dead Redemption), but for the most part I’m just not into the less focused gameplay that they offer. This held true for the first Crackdown, which I thought was pretty freaking boring, and devolved into jumping around looking for orbs or kicking thugs in the face. I actually love the orb hunting, so I can’t disparage that, but every other aspect of the game was so incredibly lackluster, that I could never really understand what people saw in the game.
Similar Experiences:
Crackdown - Meh
Most Open-World games - Kill them with fire
Orb hunting - Love it
Red Dead Redemption - Love it
Similar Experiences:
Crackdown - Meh
Most Open-World games - Kill them with fire
Orb hunting - Love it
Red Dead Redemption - Love it
