Review: Crackdown 2

Sticky feet. Before the mighty fourplayer co-op, feral hordes and almighty explosions, that’s what strikes you about the welcome return of Crackdown. Faced with a near-vertical surface, so sheer as to stretch the poor texture around it, they do what almost no other ‘free-roaming’ feet can do: they manage to find traction, just for a second, so you can reach your destination.

That could be a shortcut that makes a mission too easy, or makes dozens of square feet of level design seem pointless. The game doesn’t care. You bought it, you own it. The action game laureate has returned, and it’s almost better than ever.

The plot, as much as there is one, remains the same. In Pacific City, a metropolis made of ledges and paranoia, a nation of freaks and hoodlums is on a suicide mission against you, a genetically engineered super-cop. With supreme strength, agility and firepower – enough to leap up buildings, throw cars across bridges and clean up the streets with single grenades – you view this world the way a child views its toys. A father figure, the endlessly patient, always creepy and entirely hilarious Voice Of The Agency, struggles to make best use of you. Obliterating civilians is, after all, terrible PR; murdering your fellow agents is expensive.

Behind this fascist exterior lies the most liberal of videogames. Though the sandbox Keys To The City mode has been left for its first DLC, Crackdown 2 is even more open than before. To a fault, in fact, as we’ll explain in a moment. Redesigned as a free-flowing torrent of action suited to four online players, any of whom can drop in and out of the game without disruption, the bulk of its campaign involves a dynamic fight for territory. Rather than kingpins and bodyguards, the main objectives this time are the warrens of mutant Freaks that you have to infiltrate and purge.

We’ll put our necks out here and guess that someone behind Crackdown is a massive fan of the Blade movies. First it was harpoon guns, rooftop hurdling and a vigilante mix of firepower and kung-fu. Now it’s even more obvious. A mutual enemy of the Agents and gangs, the Freaks come out at night to feast on terrified citizens, but turn into paste when bombed with UV light. Project Sunburst, a genocide weapon hijacked by a gang named Cell, must be reclaimed and deployed one generator at a time. Restore a district’s power, firing a web of lasers to the central Agency Tower, before dropping a ‘beacon’ into the local Freak lair and protecting it until it’s charged.

Secondary objectives are manifold, and bring to mind the turf battles of Prototype. Cell divisions have occupied tactical locations across the city, and emerging Freak breaches must be closed. Those iconic collectible orbs, meanwhile, goad you from the highest, farthest and toughest reaches of the terrain. ‘Rogue orbs’, ingenious new additions that don’t sit around when spotted, lead you on merry dances that require new, lateral approaches. Live orbs encourage co-op play, and returning stunt markers and hidden orbs take hours – days – to earn and collect.

There are, in other words, plenty more toys in the box. And, just as before, most of them are orgasmic instruments of chemical warfare. Rather than just explode, rockets and grenades suck in all the physics around them and belch it out as fire, sounding across the city. Machine guns, which you can lock and focus on specific body parts, turn targets into glistening puffs of power-ups. Point them at a petrol tank and an entire street will lift above the shockwave, barrels, bodies and canisters escaping like fireworks. Sticking, homing, bouncing, whizzing, screwing, skewering and bullying, every item of ordnance has its own personality.

Raised to the power of four-way co-op, the potential for fun is extraordinary. The chief catalyst is the magnet grenade, a marvellous troublemaker that sticks any physicalised item – almost anything in this game – to another one. So, with a mischievous mind and nimble pair of hands, you could turn a car into a wrecking ball suspended from the new Agency helicopter. One chum could hang from the latter while another sits in the former, none expecting the wrong move that might accidentally flick the car high into the air and drop it on the chopper’s rotor blades, annihilating all concerned for an unintended Achievement (see ‘Urban achievers’).

The air in this new, dilapidated Pacific is thick with all the volatile ingredients of giggle fits, hearty roars and triumphant cheers. In multiplayer, especially, it’s hard to move without setting one of them off. The price, though – here it comes – is that the first game’s hugely rewarding mission structure has been sacrificed but for a few closing stages. The action is constant but rarely focused, even when funnelled into giant caves full of Freaks in all their forms. Those giant, beautifully constructed venues have lost that anatomical quality where you sneak in through pores, conquer the antibodies, disable the organs and assassinate the brain.

Furthermore, the arrival of true, apocalyptic chaos to the streets has destroyed much of their character. Fun as it is to see the proud landmarks ruined, ironically reborn as more complex climbing frames, there’s a pall across the districts that makes them all feel the same. Not even a new soundtrack ‘system’, where Cell vehicles and ghetto blasters spread music like propaganda, sunrise welcomed with a divine, Philip Glass-inspired jingle, can resuscitate it.

Necessary or not, it’s an impulse that undermines Ruffian’s first: to leave the basics of Crackdown intact. At its best, this is more than just the purest, most narcotic action game in the world – it’s a cultural pinnacle. Every superhero, be it in comic books or the movies they’ve inspired, wishes they could visit its playground. [8]