Format: Xbox 360
Maker: Realtime Worlds
Review: Jason Round

That is perhaps the perfect title for this game, because let me tell you, just like its white-power namesake, it’s super addictive. We’re talking serious insomnia here. Not hanging out with your friends, eating very little and peeing in a bottle. It’s just one of those games that you can pick up and just start instantly enjoying.

Like Saints Row, GTA and other popular ‘sprawling titles’, you roam around a constructed environment, here the imaginatively titled Pacific City, as a super-cop, if you will, set to take out the proverbial garbage in the form of a collective of bosses.

So, what’s so addictive? Well, we’ll start with the orbs. Basically, you collect them to power-up your character, though it’s the green orbs for agility that’ll have you running around like a madman.

You see, unlike other titles, Crackdown features a fantastic physics engine that allows you to jump like some V-swiggin’ frog all over the place from rooftop to rooftop and so on, and it’s all done with amazing fluidity. Collect orbs. Gain agility. Jump higher. It’s that simple.

Add into that an incredibly realistic particle-effect engine, along with big, fu*k-off weapons and the freedom to take over any vehicle, and you begin to see how this could become such a mind-sucker.
The world itself is pretty impressive, especially from a height perspective, with each power-up allowing you to reach just that wee bit higher into the clouds and skyscrapers. If you have vertigo, this might be one title to steer clear of.

Explosions – let’s talk about them for a second. They are spot-on pieces of particle art, warping and throwing bits and pieces all over the place. In fact, it’s perhaps worth the purchase price just alone to scope them out.

Apart from the zombie-like orb-lust, there are also a host of ugly bosses to tackle, though we found they tended to become a little too similar after a while, with AI lacking. That’s not to say they make for an interesting challenge, though, with the process needed to defeat cleverly hidden throughout the plot of the game.

What’s bad? Well, the graphics, while good, are nothing amazing. The sound effects are cool, but the soundtrack is lacking and once you’ve taking down all the bosses, the room is suddenly quiet as you ponder in that seemingly empty space that used to be your brain, ‘Damn, what do I do now?’.

You can always just invent stuff to do, throw cars and people and what have you, or, like us, you can jump into the multiplayer, online stuff, which is fantastic. Grab a group of buddies and scale building. It’s like ‘Team Spiderman’ on steroids.
Sure, Crackdown doesn’t have a lot of substance story-wise, but damn it’s fun. Let’s hope the next incarnation raises the bar even further, in which case we’ll need more orbs. More, more, more precious orbs, I tells you!

4/5