Crackdown 2 Review
By nature, sequels give a creator a chance to take a hard look at their first effort and make changes accordingly, fixing the flaws and building on the strengths of the original. Great sequels deliver fresh, new content and fix past issues while preserving, if not improving, the core strengths of the first game.
Crackdown 2 is not a great sequel.
In Crackdown 2 you play as a superhuman Agent, working for The Agency. Set ten years after the first game, Pacific City is overrun by day by a terrorist organization called The Cell, and at night, mutated Freaks come out to play. As an Agent, it's your job to enact Project Sunburst: a series of beacons that, when activated, will exterminate the Freaks in their lairs. The only problem: Cell has taken down the beacons' power grids, and it's up to you to get them back online before you can activate the beacons. Crackdown 2's story is bare-boned, straightforward, and unsurprising. I kept expecting a predictable late-game twist, but the story's only surprise is that there isn't one.
Crackdown 2 plays almost exactly like the first game. It's a third-person open world game where you run, jump and shoot your way through hundreds of enemies. Your Agent has five different skills, each with five levels: Agility, Strength, Firearms, Explosives, and Driving. As you level up your skills, you'll unlock more equipment and your effectiveness will increase in each respective area. You'll level up your strength, firearms, driving and explosives skills by killing Freaks and Cell members with your fists, guns, cars and explosives, respectively. To level up your Agility, though, you'll be collecting Agility Orbs scattered throughout the rooftops. Some may be really excited about the prospect of 500 more agility orbs to collect, but for me it was a hassle to have to collect a ton of orbs to get to the max level.
If you were one of the people who loved collecting every last orb in the first game, you'll love Crackdown 2. In addition to the Agility Orbs, there are 300 hidden orbs, 45 Renegade agility and driving orbs (orbs that run away from you so you have to chase them down), and 80 online orbs. These online orbs you can only get when you're playing online co-op with a friend or three. If you're playing solo, not only are you going to be locked out of getting those orbs, but they're still visible and whenever you run through one, the announcer says something about how “Online orbs are a no no for Agents working solo.”
The game plays fine; it's still fun to throw cars at your enemies and jump off of tall buildings. There is a handful of new content: a couple of new weapons, abilities and a new vehicle, but the new doesn't come close to outweighing the old, recycled content. The original Crackdown had some problems, and the sequel doesn't do anything to fix those. You're still jumping from small ledge to small ledge repeatedly in order to scale a building, and you'll still have problems aiming at the enemy you want to target. The announcer is still buggy and still loves telling you what you already know. I couldn't hear what I assume to be a major plot point in the game, due to an audio glitch where the voices cut out, and at another time he told me the same thing more than ten times in a row.
If you're hankering for more orbs to collect, Crackdown 2 is great, but if you're looking for a sequel that builds on the foundation and improves the weaknesses of the first game, look elsewhere. Playing through the game, it was hard to get over the feeling that I had already played this game a couple of years ago. With only minor gameplay changes, Crackdown 2 fails to evolve the Crackdown formula, and the end result is a game that looks and feels all too familiar.
