Crackdown 2 Review

The problem is, four-player co-op is really all the game brings to the table over its predecessor. Doubling the number of Agents capable of teaming up over the previous game was a great move and makes Live play exponentially more entertaining than before. But everything else about Crackdown 2 is a letdown: The best parts are those lifted straight from the first game, while all the new additions are annoying at best, infuriating at worst. Crackdown 2 is ridiculously fun, but it owes that success entirely to the first game.

Click the image above to check out all Crackdown 2 screens.

Realtime Worlds' 2007 hit was a genuine sleeper, a subversive and unexpected success that earned accolades and word-of-mouth praise on the strengths of its addictive blend of open-world design, over-the-top character powers, and the stick-and-carrot lure of Agility Orbs. Crackdown gave players a crime-ridden metropolis as a playground, then encouraged them to explore its heights and hidden corners by doling out hundreds of collectibles that empowered them even further, enabling their Agents to reach even higher heights and better-hidden corners. The main mission was almost incidental, something we did almost as a footnote to scavenging for orbs across Pacific City. Sure, it was a messy, half-baked game in a lot of ways, but it was genuinely addictive and fun to play.

The sequel is basically the same game with largely cosmetic changes, most of which work to its detriment. Once again, players explore Pacific City, which is more or less the exact same city as before; the difference is that this time many of the most memorable landmarks have been damaged, and the town is overrun with zombies at night. Zombies are a questionable gimmick to begin with, because it's so difficult to make videogame zombies feel genuinely fresh and interesting. Left 4 Dead succeeds; Crackdown 2, on the other hand, doesn't. Here, the throngs of zombies simply serve to amplify the series' shortcomings.

One of the big disappointments of the original Crackdown was that by the end of the game, you'd become so powerful that the last few missions felt almost trivial. A high-level Agent could simple wade through mobs of weakling bad guys, mopping up the mooks without a care, and even killing most bosses without breaking a sweat. What Crackdown really needed were enemies on par with the Agent, capable of facing the player on his own terms. But instead, developer Ruffian has taken the opposite tack; rather than challenging players with smarter, deadlier enemies, they just flood the screen with rabble and hope the numbers win the day.

For a couple hours of play, the zombies actually pose a threat...but then your skills increase, allowing you to annihilate crowds of zombies with a missile or grenade or even a ground-punch shockwave. Eventually the game rolls out a couple of super zombie types, but even these tend to be no threat unless they spawn outside your range of vision and knock you down with a cheap hit from behind. And even then they're only a problem because they like to trap you with the game's annoying ragdoll stun physics during time-sensitive missions.

Those missions are unpleasant enough without cheap A.I. tactics. Ruffian tries to diversify your objectives over those in the first Crackdown (which consisted entirely of "take down three gang bosses in any order you like"), but the solutions they settled on are hardly an improvement. This time, you still have to fight for control of gang-occupied turf, but it's only a single gang, and there are few tactical considerations for how you advance. In Crackdown, defeating different sub-bosses would cripple specific aspects of an overlord's operation; here, the only thing you have to worry about is clearing an entire stronghold of bases before you lose control over territory you've already claimed.

Click the image above to check out all Crackdown 2 screens.

Still, those are the good missions. The bad missions are the ones involving zombies, since they consist entirely of dealing with vast, mindless mobs in confined spaces as you protect light-emitting beacons from their advances. Basically, it's a series of stationary escort missions. These are utterly maddening until you level up your explosives ratings, at which point they practically become cakewalks. Worse, they also represent a disappointing missed opportunity, as a number of these beacon missions feature mega-zombies that are about 15 feet tall and take serious effort to defeat. These behemoths focus entirely on the beacons, though, and never really pose a direct threat to you.

Finally, when all is said and done, there's the dreadful endgame sequence, which is similar to the beacon missions in focus but infinitely more annoying. Your reward for suffering through it all? A choppy joke of an ending that feels even more rushed and unfinished than the rest of the game.

It's bad enough that the game's missions feel poor in comparison to Crackdown's mediocre campaign objectives, but even Pacific City itself feels less interesting this time around. Part of that is undoubtedly a contempt bred of familiarity, since so much of the world -- up to and including the placement of many orbs -- is simply carried over from the original. Yet the city itself is less inspiring, too; it's dark and grimy, where the older version of Pacific City stood apart from its HD-generation peers through its use of hyper-saturated colors. Crackdown's world created a clever contrast -- a seemingly utopian future city rotting from crime within -- which made for a perfect counterpart to the player's role as a supposed agent of justice and law enforcement ultimately serving the ends of a brutal fascist regime. There's none of that ambiguity here; the city is grimy and crumbling, and the Agency doesn't bother to veil its naked lust for power. A small thing, maybe, but the lack of narrative subtlety is telling all the same.

Despite all these failings, though, Crackdown 2 is still a lot of fun, especially with friends. The way it hews so closely to the original game definitely serves to highlight its lack of inspiration, but it also ensures that the core of what made Crackdown so good -- tackling Pacific City on your own terms, hunting orbs, and steadily transforming into a near-invincible engine of skyscraper-climbing destruction -- is neatly replicated here as well. There's no question that Crackdown 2 is a mere shadow of the first game, which stands as an absolute classic. The sequel feels more like an ambitious user mod than a true follow-up. Still, I suspect that Crackdown fans hankering for an excuse to revisit Pacific City will find enough to like about this imperfect sequel to justify at least a rental. Just be sure to enlist a few friends to help make the most of the experience.