InsaneBear

Our Adventures: Crackdown Session 1

Being the avid Co-op gamers that we are here at InsaneBear, Ryan and I recently purchased 2007’s open-world super-hero crime-fighting Crackdown. And at only $10 on Newegg, you really can’t go wrong. So after a few weeks of holding off on my shiny, new game, Ryan came over on Wednesday and the marathon began.

Things were a bit crazy at first. We probably should have guessed that this game wasn’t going to hold our hands when we first set our session up. As the laws of awesomeness state, video games can no longer just have Easy, Normal, and Hard settings–they have to have cool names. Crackdown features Tough, Ruthless, and Psychotic. We picked Ruthless, assuming it to be Normal, but pairing a complete lack of difficulty descriptions with the number of times we went on to die, I’m starting to think we miscalculated that.

Keeping with the theme of not guiding the player, we were dropped into the game-world with not a one tutorial and only vague orders from what sounded like Adam West. Putting the shoddy map to use, we surmised that we should go to the strange orange marking. This marking turned out to be a supply point which was in enemy hands, and we fumbled through some of the most awkward controls and aiming systems in recent memory to retake the depot. Along the way, Ryan shot some friendly cops (because of the aiming system, which seems to target dead people, inanimate objects, and allies before the closest enemy) and they developed a grudge towards him that lasted for the next few hours.

In the chaos that ensued, Ryan made his way to the next mission marker, which was some sort of low level boss within the intimidatingly named Los Muertos street gang. I on the other hand, stopped to fight every enemy on the way. After about twenty minutes of slaughtering endless gang-bangers, I adopted Ryan’s strategy and just drove past them. I would have appreciated it if Adam West told me that enemies occupy every corner of every street in the game-world until you destroy their entire gang, but alas, my shooting skills leveled up while Ryan’s driving skills rose. And that was good for him, because this is the sort of thing that happens when you try to drive in Crackdown without a significant amount of driving points.

As we began to get our bearings in this new and strange world that offered us no guidance, we worked our way through another low level boss and some more street thugs. When the game offered us no bosses to fight, we captured more supply points. Then Ryan’s TV fell off of my bed and onto my foot. That was fun. Guess the floor’s a better place anyways.

Still no more boss updates. Hmm…road trip? Whoa, now we’re in Russian territory. We should probably head back. Oh, cool, a boss update. Let’s go fight this guy.

And this is where things really got interesting. This particular boss had a Scarface mansion packed with an army of eternally spawning closet henchmen, thugs that would appear out of thin air, an endless supply of explosive vans that liked to drive off of the bridge to his fortress, machine gun nests in every direction, snipers who took cover behind moving bells, and an arsenal of high-powered weapons. He also had a secret submarine-bay entrance worthy of a Bond villain, with an alarm bell and all. I’d even bet he had a pool full of sharks with laser beams on their heads hidden somewhere in that mansion, but I was really too busy dying to find it.

We tried all sorts of different tactics before realizing that it was best to just run past all the enemies and into the cartel boss’ personal bar, where we bombarded him with a wall of grenades. Three day and night cycles later (about two hours to those not residing in Pacific City) we finally defeated the abomination. Adam West’s update let us know that he was the head boss of the Mexican cartel. Oh, cool, so we just skipped over about five easier bosses because this was the only objective the game gave us as we wandered around aimlessly.

After that utterly ridiculous mission, we just wandered for a while in search of the remaining bosses. It was at this point that our obsession with orbs began. You see, throughout the world of Crackdown, there are hidden orbs of experience. The game’s fiction tries to explain them as supplements or some such nonsense, but they’re really just collectable items that boost your character’s stats–the bread and butter of any good game from the ’90’s. But hey, the hunt for orbs became the game within the game for us. We’d keep telling ourselves that we would stop and fight a boss, but then we’d find a section with orbs as far as the eye could see. Those luscious, glowing, green orbs were like sweet smack that our super-cop dudes shot into their veins. In the process of raiding the city for any orbs we could find, we managed to finish off the Mexicans in style.

From there, it was on to the Russians. Damn rooskies, always causing trouble and driving through the streets in fully armored military vehicles. They were so much trouble in fact, that Ryan and I decided to just hunt for some more orbs for a while. We even threw in the occasional supply point too, just to say we’d done something mission-related. But then RPGs started interfering with our roof-top orb escapades, and we knew it was time to bring justice to the bosses of The Volk.

That whole justice-bringing thing was working out great for about two bosses, but then we hit a wall. There was this one boss who’s oil refinery/home appeared to be completely abandoned, and our intel said something about flushing him out of hiding. So we searched and searched for a way, and Adam West yelled about shooting a button once, but we could find no button. At one point, Mr. West said something about hidden messages in the city’s billboards, so we devoted some resources to that too. I’m not exactly sure what this one was telling us…

After almost an hour of head-scratching, we checked GameFaqs and the description of enemies and readily apparent buttons to shoot led us to believe that our mission was glitching. Sure enough, upon restarting the game and making our way back to the base, it was crawling with commies who were just begging for some hot lead. We made quick work of the hiding boss and then wandered for a while until a new boss update showed up. This would be our last boss for the night, and I think his ridiculousness made for an appropriate finale.

Logically, this Russian crime-lord resided at “Camp Johnson”. This particular camp was surrounded with water-mines, almost as if he was expecting us to come by boat. Except for the fact that there’s no boats in the game. But I guess one of his goons did blow me into one, which killed me. So maybe they did their job. But I wouldn’t be much of a super-cop if I let a little water-mine deter me, so we continued with the assault on the heavily armed “Camp Johnson” with a barrage of rockets and grenades. Then I swam around to the secret back entrance and kicked down a blast door like paper machete. We disposed of the high-ranking foe and celebrated the only way we know how.

We ended the night after about 8 hours of play in which we probably got about 2/3rds through the game. I’ve been pretty harsh on Crackdown so far for it’s strange controls (X changes your gun and LB reloads?), the awful aiming system (see: Ryan and his trouble with the law), its inconceivable lack of guidance, and the fact that we had more fun hunting for orbs than actually completing missions. But I will admit, I had fun playing it. It’s an open-world co-op game that lets you and your buddy independently do whatever the hell you want and there’s a nice sense of progression with all the stats, although they seem to level up at very odd rates sometimes and I wish you didn’t have to level up to have any sort of fun with basic gameplay elements like driving. The visual style is nice too. It’s sort of like Borderlands but less extreme. When you are leveled up, it’s a lot of fun to just leap around the city and do super-cop sorts of things. I just wish there was a little more direction and that Realtime Worlds had bothered to meet the design standards of other current games when they made this potential-laden super-hero/GTA crossover.

Author: Cody

Tags: co-op, crackdown, david jones, marathon, microsoft, Our Adventures, realtime worlds, xbox 360