Crackdown 2

The Short

Pros

- Same fundamental addicting orb-grabbing as Crackdown

- Four player co-op leads to some total madness

- Add zombies. That's cool, I guess. 

- Essentially does all the same things Crackdown did, providing you a big city with lots of things to play with

Cons

- Provides literally no change or improvements over the first game

- Climbing is still cumbersome and tedious, especially in a world where Assassin's Creed and Prototype exist

- More agility orbs, including ones that run away and are obnoxious to grab. Levels for these are slower.

- Exact same city, to a "t." No serious new content here. 

- Gameplay is the same repetitive, droll thing over and over again

- The "evolving cars" aspect from the first game is gone, which is too bad

- Less content than the first game

- Graphics are unchanged, which is to say they look pretty bad. Even the "cell shading" style can't save it

- Essentially, this game is the first Crackdown with a step forward (four player co-op) and several steps back, meaning you should just play the first game

Crackdown 2 is Crackdown with beasties. And suffering them not to live. 

The Long

Crackdown is a weird game, for a variety of reasons. It was released with a code to get into the Halo 3 multiplayer beta, which meant a lot of people bought Crackdown just to play some Halo. To everybody's surprise (especially the ones who just considered the Crackdown disc a nice coaster next to their Halo alien blasting beta) Crackdown was actually a pretty good game. Sort of an odd hybrid between Grand Theft Auto, a leveling/rpg system, and cop simulator, Crackdown did a lot of things that were new and interesting to the open world genre at the time. It had a heavy focus on vertical traversal, lots of leveling in different areas (guns, melee, driving, climbing, and explosives) with lots of dramatic changes as you upgraded. Rockets that started off weak eventually had massive explosions, punches that barely scratched a guy were soon launching buses into the air, and while your super-cop at first could hardly jump, soon he was scaling buildings. 

It was a neat little game, and while some parts of it were clunky (the climbing especially) it was good at the time. When they announced Crackdown 2 a while later, promising improvements (and in a world where Assassin's Creed, Infamous, and Prototype had done the vertical traversal much better) and a bigger, more expansive experience, I was excited. Crackdown very much threw down the gauntlet for open-world games like this, and when the others had come to match it, I could only imagine Crackdown 2 would do its best to retake or at least match the competition.

Bad news. It didn't. In fact, it might be worse than the first game. 

They added gliding (aped from Prototype) but you don't unlock it until way, WAY late in the game

On the offset, you might think this game isn't that bad. Booting it up you'll get a serious feeling of deja vu: everything seems almost exactly the same. Your blue armored, helmeted dude. The same five attributes to level up (guns, melee, driving, climbing, explosives) and they level up in the same way as before. There are green orbs everywhere, testing your skill at climbing and jumping and proving extremely frustrating when you leap and just miss one after climbing a stupid building for fifteen minutes. It's even the exact same city, down to every detail! Ok, maybe there are one or two changes, but if you spent a lot of time in the first game you'll easily remember the districts, buildings, and areas of Pacific City. But hey, more of the same is good, right?

No. Not really.

Here's the thing, the first Crackdown was released in 2007, near the start of the Xbox 360's lifecycle. At this point, the biggest open world game out there was the Grand Theft Auto series, with the whole "open world superhero sim" not really kicking off. However, since then Crackdown inspired a bunch of these types of games. I've mentioned a lot before, but specifically Prototype showed how powerful, godlike, and just plain fun being a superhuman badass thrown into a free-roaming city could be. Traversal was fast (you literally held a button and just ran up the side of buildings) and felt clean, and rather than hindering you the city was more of a plaything. This was the direction the genre had moved, improving upon Crackdown's formula to streamline out the annoying parts and add more of the parts people enjoyed. 

Crackdown 2 pretends those games don't even exists, and goes right back to its clunky, 2007 gameplay.

Throwing cars around is still pretty awesome

Climbing is the biggest offender here. Since you start out barely being able to jump, it is imperative you quickly grab a bunch of orbs to power up your jumping. The issue is 1. There are more orbs in this game, meaning you have to collect more to level up and 2. The obnoxious, "I don't know if I can make this jump" is back. The biggest problem with Crackdown's vertical traversal was the fact that you never knew if you could make a jump, and failing just slightly could backtrack several minutes of work. This was slightly remedied once you maxed out your "Agility" stat, seeing as you could jump like 40 feet into the air and leap building to building. But it was still annoying when you knew where you were supposed to go, but the game just didn't give you the handholds (or tell you where they were) to get there. Again, this was remedied in every other game of this type, mostly be providing easier handholds or making it more automatic. Crackdown 2 doesn't streamline it at all, keeping the awful, clunky traversal from the first game. This was fine in 2007, it is not fine now.

Secondly, everything else about the game is the same. The guns are the same. The explosions (while great) are the same (start small, get big). Targeting is the same. Melee combat is as clunky as ever. Driving is also just as loose as before. These are things that, again, were forgivable in 2007's Crackdown, but this game came out in 2011. It's like Ruffian literally did nothing to improve or change the old game, other than add a (slightly) new coat of paint.

Oh, an zombies. Let's talk about those.

Because zombies in video games aren't old or anything. 

So the game has a day/night cycle (as did the first game) but now when night rolls around the "Freaks" (aka zombies) crawl out of the sewers and take over the city! Basically it spawns hundreds of these guys, later adding bigger ones that have the power to knock you over and keep you pinned on the ground (a gameplay favorite), punch you off cliffs or buildings (also a favorite), attack at range to make sure you can't ever climb anything again (yay for bad climbing!) and swarm you so you get stuck in a "getting hit" animation. Awesome!

The Freaks are also the reason for the whole "story" element of the game. Now, granted, Crackdown didn't exactly have the most deep story or mission structure. Basically you went and blew up certain installations, and when you'd blown up enough you'd go to a "safehouse" of a gang member, sack it, and then the area would be cleaned out. It was kind of weak, but since this was 2007 we were more forgiving, and honestly I spent more time dicking around the city than doing the actual missions.

Apparently Ruffian really liked the repetitive mission structure, because they basically tripled it and...that was it. 

Adding turrets to trucks is not a significant enough change, Crackdown 2

Here's how it works. During the day, you go around and mess up game installations, just as before. This consists of marking a place for an Agency (police) drop, then killing everybody in the area while you wait for the chopper to take its sweet time showing up. After they do you've "cleaned out" the area (though it can be recaptured if you don't guard it, which is a major pain in the ass) and you can proceed to the next one. After about three areas in a group the whole section of town is cleared. Hooray. You've won the war on drugs. Now do it fifteen more times.

Then at night you have the ZAMBIES...sorry, "Freaks." Anyway, you'd expect some sort of riveting gameplay innovation with these guys right? Wrong! 

First off you go murder a bunch of dudes around these "light towers," which are scattered at the most inconvenient places around the city. So you climb up there, kill a bunch of dudes or Freaks, and turn them on. Once you have three on, you unlock a "light bomb." Then you go underground to the Freak lair, set the bomb to activate and...wait for the bomb to take its sweet time going off as you defend against waves of zombies. If it fails during it's massive chargeup, you have to start over. So it's almost exactly like the daytime gang wars.

Repeat fifteen more times and you've won the game. 

There are a few small gang establishments to take down and "Freak Spawns" that consist if you defending a point against a spawn until it goes away (how original!) but for the most part, that is the entire extent of the "point" of Crackdown 2. The whole game, the same boring "defend this point" over and over. No mission variety, nothing. Wow. 

Explosions are still cool, though my favorite thing from the first game (going to a freeway and just blowing everything up for fun) doesn't seem to work as well with the whole "freaks" showing up and ruining my fun. 

Crackdown 2 is uninspired at every turn. Rather than improve on an old formula, Ruffian simply took it and gave it a new coat of paint (though even that might be a generous overexagguration of the changes made). Literally nothing is improved, plenty of things are worse, and as a whole it just goes to show how dated these gameplay mechanics have become. It's a lazy attempt to cash in on the original game's "popularity" (which I still don't know if it was because of the Halo 3 beta or not) and it failed miserably. Buy Prototype instead.

If you've never played Crackdown, I'd still recommend the first one over this one, but if you really love zombies then I guess you could get this one instead, since it's pretty much the same game. Don't pay more than $5 for it, though.

One out of five stars. This game's existence is redundant, so it shouldn't even be considered for purchase, play, or anything else besides sitting alone and unloved on a Gamestop used shelf.