Crackdown (for the Xbox 360) was a really fun and pretty game that may have had the dumbest ending ever, but in no way did that detract from what made it good. Yet here I am thinking to myself:
- Wow. I’m never gonna pick that up ever again.
This is an irony with certain games; no matter how good a game can be sometimes, you just don’t feel like it’s worth playing the same levels, the same way, through the same story again. There are certain advantages in games like Final Fantasy VII, Saints Row, Fallout, and Sands of Time that allow the player to want to play the game over and over, and Crackdown really has none of the defining characteristics that make it one of these games.
For example, in Final Fantasy VII you can choose different powers to take on each play through, allowing you to experiment with the different characters and Materia combinations. In Crackdown the abilities you get are set in stone as to when you’ll get them and, for the most part, how powerful they can be at the time you get them.
In games like Fallout you can replay the game multiple times with varying skill sets and see the multiple endings. But Crackdown only has one ending…and only one character with just different skins. The variety provided by those skins adds nothing to the gameplay and the ending isn’t worth working to get to once you already know it. It’s needless to say that it’s predictable, and obvious to say poorly executed.
As for Sands of Time, going through an intentionally linear game with lots of puzzles can be great fun a second time, if both the puzzles and the story are well done. Sands of Time is probably one of the greatest examples of seamlessly meshing story and puzzle platforming. A player may want to retread this ground not only because of the gameplay but the story, like rereading a great book or watching a classic film over and over. And in Saints Row there are multiple gangs and lots of little side missions, you may want to replay it to experience the gang warfare in a different order and to play different side missions. These two blatantly opposite games, one being extremely linear and the other very open world, use their key elements to make themselves well worth a second go in their respective ways.
And that’s really where the biggest problem in Crackdown lies, it’s a linear game pretending to be open world. You first have to kill off the Chicanos, than the Russians, than the Chinese, in that order. If you stay from it you’ll find that you would be easily slaughtered and left unable to jump high enough to get up the taller buildings. There’s no variety, but they pretend there is. While there is a difficulty curve it should sink up with your character’s progression from one gang to the next without fear. The story is atrocious and the puzzles usually consist of button-mash the baddies.
All that said it was a FUN game. It’s just that I can’t see it having any replay value after the first go, and therefore a game with some serious flaws.
