This couldn’t have come at a more perfect time; and not just because of the largely unpleasant drip-feed the Xbox 360 shelf space has had to suffer over the past few months. No, we’re thankfully clearing that little slump just now anyway. We instead welcome this with open arms because of the fact that it is excruciatingly simple to just pick up and play.

There’s no tutorial to speak of, you can learn the controls in a matter of minutes, it’s perfectly clear what you should be doing right from the off and the learning curve is – at least for the first few hours – forgiving. It’s been a while since we’ve been able to say that about any Xbox 360 game.

Switch this on and fun will follow, about that there is no doubt. Whether you’re piling up cars for chain explosions, climbing up to the tops of skyscrapers, seeing how far you can toss bodies into the ocean or (just occasionally) chasing down bad guys, the fun flows consistently from start to finish.

This is mainly thanks to just how fluid the combat is. When a third-person shooter gets too fast the level of skill required and ease with which you can actually score a kill normally cease to have any kind of relevance. Take a look at Just Cause if you need an example. Like the Eidos shooter, Crackdown uses an auto-targeting system, however, it’s not been added here as a mere aid to compensate for the speed at which you move – you can quite easily jump all over the place and remain fairly accurate without any kind of help. Instead, the targeting adds an entirely new layer of skill, allowing you to orchestrate some fiendish executions.

When you pull the left trigger you’ll lock on to whatever you’re cursor is pointing at, unless it’s a civilian – you’re not encouraged to ‘play’ with those for some reason. Picking one specific target out can be tricky when you’ve got a lot going on but you learn soon enough. When you are locked on the camera fixes and the right analogue switches from aiming to fine-tuning. Tap it up once to aim at the head, left or right for an arm, down for the legs. The same applies to vehicles, although this time the right analogue lets you aim for the tyres, engine block and so on. As complicated as all this may sound, it works perfectly. The UI is easy to understand and quick to change, regardless of what you may be doing. You’ll also find yourself tweaking most of your shots in a big battle.

Add this accuracy to the superhuman abilities and boredom becomes a null point. Other shooters like this, such as Saints Row and Just Cause, may suffer from repetition but the combat here is impossible to fault. Where else can you… leap from a building carrying a car, target a group of guys on the street below, throw the car at them, switch the targeting over to the engine block of the car and turn everyone involved (including the unfortunate driver who was in the car at the time) into a crispy barbecue at the same moment you land crouched in a macho pose with bodies raining down behind you? Nowhere, that’s where.

This is also littered with moments that make you look bad-ass cool, each one created by you, not scripted by the developer. You hear the term ‘sandbox’ a lot, but this embodies the true definition. The developer has basically created this world just for you to have fun in, and you alone. This could never be described as restrictive. When we were facing off against one of the generals, we tried to win the fight by beating him to death with his own henchmen alone. Well, you just would, wouldn’t you? We came close, really close, but sadly failed. This matters not, the whole point is that we were able to try something like this in the first place.

There are six generals and one kingpin per each of the three gangs on the map, which, if you do the maths, makes 21 targets in total for you to hunt down. Plus, all of these are protected by hundreds of goons. The idea (which has been shouted about since this was announced) is to take a few, if not allof the generals to weaken the kingpin for each gang. Hence ‘crackdown’
on crime. For example, take out the gang’s weapons expert to degrade their arsenal, the recruiter to thin their ranks and so on.

This is a great idea in theory but you don’t really notice it when you’re running about firing rockets at anything that moves. In fact, since your character upgrades and overall power almost run parallel to each general falling, we didn’t even feel these effects until the third gang. We were expecting this feature to be an important part of the tactics, but it turns out it’s not that much of a big deal. The ‘probability of success’ meter that appears whenever you near a general or kingpin has this covered anyway. This is a great addition that lets you know exactly where you stand and makes you feel all smug should you
succeed against low odds.

Even when the odds are in your favour it can be easy to slip up in Crackdown. The further you eat into the gangs the more you realise that you need to make use of the rechargeable health. It’s much more preferable to run away and come back to a few more men surrounding one general than having to relaunch the assault from scratch. Thankfully if you do bite the big
one it doesn’t take more than a minute or so to get back into the fray. This is nowhere near as annoying for restarts as the one game many will inevitably compare it to – Grand Theft Auto. Yes, you will die lots but the open nature of the task in hand, the multiple respawn points and the fact that you can attack each target in numerous ways removes the level of frustration that has dogged GTA for so long.

The only minor restriction we found was the order in which we had to tackle the gangs/islands. Okay, so we did have the option to walk right up to the front door of the baddest mofo right off the bat but we didn’t need any probability meter to tell us we weren’t going to last any longer than a few seconds.

Apart from the lack of strength and weapon power you start off with, there is one obvious attribute that is essential to upgrade for progression; athletics.Height plays a massive role; generally speaking the more important a character is, the higher they will sit and the harder they will be to bring down. The most entertaining feature of Crackdown – and the one that truly sets it apart from the numerous other free-roaming city games – is your ability to climb any building. This isn’t quite as elaborate as you may have been reading; you’re not an ugly version of Superman. When your athletics stat is maxed you won’t be able to jump over entire buildings but you will be able to make it onto the roof of most two- or three-storey blocks with one bound.

We spent the first couple of hours of play purely messing around with this feature alone, jumping from rooftop to ledge and building up our athletics stat. The precision with which you can do this is stunning. All you need do is line up the crosshairs on an important jump and, stat allowing, you’re guaranteed to hit your mark, no matter how small it may be. When you get to the last island (which is covered in skyscrapers) this becomes such an integral part of the gameplay that you often find yourself staring at buildings trying to figure out your route to the top. There’s nothing more annoying than getting halfway up only to end up hanging from a windowsill with nowhere else to go other than dropping to a painful death.

This is another reason why it becomes so easy to get back into the action, from spawning. A hop, skip and a jump will land you right back where you died. In fact, we found absolutely no reason at all to touch a car. You can make your way around a lot faster just by using the rooftops. What contact with cars we had usually involved either ripping their doors off for makeshift weapons or using them as portable explosive barrels. It’s a shame really. There is no problem with the handling of the vehicles or the number of them on the road, let alone the fact that the variety is impressive.

You can of course choose which direction you want to take your agent. There are five stats in the game (driving, athletics, strength, accuracy, demolitions) and at the start you’ll find that you only want to concentrate on a couple of these. You may decide that you want to boost your driving skill first, although we’re not sure why. We could never be bothered to go all the way back to base every time we lost/broke the – admittedly awesome-looking – Agency supercar. If you are going to drive
everywhere you want to be in one of these; and if you plan on taking part in any of the races it becomes an essential piece of kit.

Which brings us on to our biggest disappointment – and the main reason for the drop in score from nine to eight. Crackdown has absolutely zero depth. Sure, you’ve got these 21 targets and numerous ways with which to take them out of the equation but that’s about it. The ‘side missions’ consist of these races and hunting for the Realtime Worlds equivalent of hidden packages. You can clear the first gang in the space of around four hours and, although the difficulty level ramps up after this, it isn’t going to take you more than a couple of days to rid this world of scum. Saints Row might not have been the most
giving of creatures but it did have variety.

After the first few weeks of fooling around with the combat, seeing if you can’t climb every building and playing co-op online, you’re going to start wondering what else there is to do. Give it another week and you’ll be drumming your fingers eagerly watching out for a new island or a new gang to be downloaded over Live Marketplace (something that has already been hinted at by the developer). This is as much a complement as it is a complaint. The action is so intense and beautiful to look
at that you’ll find any excuse to keep things going. However, there just isn’t enough in here to make this a game that stays in your stack.

Does that mean you should avoid Crackdown? No, not by a long way. This offers a ridiculous amount of fun. Of course, there’s also the small matter of the Halo 3 Beta that comes part and parcel, but this is pretty much an insult to the awesomeness on show. If we worked at Realtime Worlds we’d be royally p*ssed off by that Halo 3 sticker. This is worth the cash on its own and doesn’t need Master Chief to hold its hand.

Mike Richardson