Crackdown

[Mr Companion]

I pretty much never do reviews but I want to vent my frustration before I end up doing something violently unpleasant to somebody so here comes a very short quite angry review of Crackdown 1.

Good points:

It boasts a unique and aesthetically pleasing art style that captures the comic book superhero vibe, it features very satisfying platforming and character ability progression. And the open ended mission acquisition is an interesting and amusing experiment that only slightly fails to fully innovate the structure of the sandbox genre.

Bad points:

The games idea of a difficulty curve is to introduce environments that have no cover, no tactical flexibility and prevent you from utilising your characters capabilities in an entertaining or effective manner. The enemies end up coming at you in massive hordes that take a great deal of very uninteresting cover based combat to dispatch and yet you only realise too late that the enemies are being produced by a bullshitty infinite respawn point you couldn't have possibly known about. On top of this their arsenal of weaponry becomes ludicrous as they fire instantkill rockets at you en-mass that makes combat nearly impossible and the game finally finishes you off by endowing enemies with multiple health bars and tactical positions that may as well place you in the position of a fish recently relocated to the bottom of a barrel. Which is coincidentally where I feel like throwing this game after it tears me a new one for the tenth time.

So there you have it, my review of crackdown. Intentionally short, intentionally uninformative and unintentionally not very good at all (the review I mean). See ya next time!

 

[tiredinnuendo]

You know that you can remove enemy health bars, most of their good weapons, and in fact reduce their numbers in general plus a bunch of other stuff by killing the bosses in the right order, right?

- J

 

[Mr Companion]

You know that you can remove enemy health bars, most of their good weapons, and in fact reduce their numbers in general plus a bunch of other stuff by killing the bosses in the right order, right?

- J

I sure do! And I used that to take out the first and second gang leaders. But where to start with the final lot? Since I am playing on "relentless" difficulty (because I thought it being in the middle meant I should just go with it despite the scary name) pretty much all the bosses in the Chinese faction are surrounded by mass armies of deadly soldiers who are very quick to replace your biological form with a hot lead substitute. In fact the surprising thing about the main Chinese king pin is that his doom tower is actually less defended than his generals, even if it does take about half a friggin hour to get up to the top of his tower only to find out he is positioned atop a mighty balcony overlooking a wide, open and coverless space and- oh sorry where was I? Oh yeah the bosses...

Well anyway my frustrations go beyond meer difficulty, its the very nature of the combat restricting the amount of fun you have in order to present a challenge that displeases me.
Not that I don't like a good challenge, I mean this is coming from somebody who likes to play through games of "Hard" mode the first time through and mods games in order to increase difficulty beyond reasonable levels. But when a game tries to keep the player from doing fun tactics (like running around and kicking people in the face in crackdown) then I get very angry.

Now I come to think of it a version of the game with no guns where you just run around and kick people in the face while trying to avoid getting overwhelmed would be pretty sweet.

 

[MiracleOfSound]

The enemies aren't infinite. There are a lot of them, but they thin out eventually through enough attrition.

I don't remember any sections with no cover? There's nearly always a sneaky way to get around or above them.

At the top of Shai Gen tower all you need to do is run straight out, jump up onto his balcony and run around the back to recharge your shields.

You can also take out a whole slew of his cronies from the stairwell.

 

[SamtheDeathclaw]

Holy shite. Uhhmm... Ever heard of that agility skill? You can climb pretty much every building, and the snipers have a ridiculous range. Sounds like you get your arse kicked so you made a sham of a review about it? No offense of course, I can remember a few sections where the Shai-Gen ripped me a new one or three with those rocket launchers.