(Cracked) down

I dunno.......I bought Crackdown a few weeks back. I was really looking forward to it too. I still have fond memories of those first few moments playing Vice City and giggling like a schoolboy while mowing down my first pedestrian and feeling like Damien in a big van. That feeling hasn't been matched by sandbox type games since. I was really looking forward to pretending to be a big black man with a super suit and bouncing all over a city I didn't have to unlock by doing missions that drove me round the bend with their extreme difficulty spikes and remote control helicopter bombers.......

but it has been a disappointment. I like the bouncing around and collecting green orbs. I even like the driving and the explosions, but the missions are the same mission over and over again and for someone like me, who doesn't have that much time to play, they are tiring. Its basically a shooting mission replayed in different locations and at varying difficulty levels: shoot everything until you get to the boss. Then punch him or her in the face until they are dead.

Granted, there are different ways you can go about this and I did have real fun on the lighthouse mission, but there are only so many ways to skin a cat, and to be honest, I don't have the time or the inclination to be really inventive and learn to set up ramps to jump into buildings and go all "Just Cause" on a boss.

I guess I have learned I like to be led a bit more. I like Ghost Recon AW single player. I can take it at my own pace, its linear, I can pretend to be an expert marksman and when I'm done I feel like I've gotten somewhere.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for spontaneity and the unforeseen in a game, its just that I don't have the time and simply can't be arsed to play exploit the so-called "chemistry set" the director of Crackdown described it as.........I mentioned Just Cause above. I have to say that I have had much more fun with this game. I found that it was much easier and more inviting to try different things out during the missions and it was much more likely that something utterly mad and wonderful would occur as I did - a helicopter was never far away, I could always get airborne from a car or boat and there is NOTHING that beats escaping by the skin of your teeth after a successful mission by riding a big motorcycle of a cliff and then freefalling to safety as the tropical sun goes down......in Crackdown, I'd still be on the ground, emotionally as well as physically.

The most exciting bits in Crackdown are when you're airborne - or nearly airborne. When you're scaling the agency tower to jump from the top or bounding around like a roided-up Easter Bunny from rooftop to rooftop......but even then you're not really doing anything.....you're not really fighting baddies and you're not really free...not in the same take-your-breath-away way that I found with Just Cause anyhow.

The thing with Crackdown is that even with all that freedom, you're not really taking off and flying, and if you really look, there isn't much to do in town.
Just Cause's world was big, wide and empty, but somehow you could enjoy that emptiness more, and the main missions, albeit limited in number, are much more FUN. In Just Cause I can feel that I've achieved something after only 30 minutes, much like Ghost Recon, and both games make me feel like an expert spy or soldier for a moment or two. But Crackdown doesn't do that. Unless I'm bounding about collecting orbs, then I feel like a kid at christmas who has just found out that of the huge pile of gifts under the tree, only two were for him, and one was another pair of socks for school.

My feeling is that Crackdown is as empty as Just Cause, and certainly not as ambitious. It smacks of laziness on the part of the design team. If you take away the agility and the orbs, theres nothing there but bullets.