Games / Game Reviews

Review: Crackdown 2

By Sean Booker
July 30, 2010 - 13:03

Crackdown 2 is an open world shooter that gives the player super human powers while they fight crime and kill freaks. Though each core element of the game works fine on its own, the similarities to the original Crackdown are far too massive. It’s this fact alone that causes Crackdown 2 to feel quite shallow despite all the fun to be had.

The game is set ten years after the original Crackdown, and has you playing as a new agent from The Agency. Your goal is to assist The Agency in fighting and cleansing Pacific City from the enemy group known as the Cell. Along with this, Crackdown 2 features an all new day and night cycle and the new enemy known as the freaks will spawn during the latter portion to provide another type of enemy to suppress.

Like the first game, you are given super human abilities that range from being able to lift and throw cars to jumping over skyscrapers. As you progress through the game you will be able to level up your character in several different ways. Killing enemies in hand to hand combat will increase your strength and health, while blowing up and using explosives makes your grenades more power and unlocks new weapons.

And of course, everyone’s favorite glowing collectables – the agility orbs – return and continue to be incredibly fun to jump around the city searching for. Along with the agility orbs, all new renegade type orbs and online orbs are added. The renegade orbs add a bit more enjoyment to the hunt as they tend to glide around the roof tops (or along the streets) in attempt to run away from the player. Online orbs can only be collected when playing with at least one other player.

For the majority of your time you will be hunting down enemy strong holds in attempt to eliminate everyone in the area. Most of the enemies are quite simple to kill and require only a few quick shots from any one of your numerous guns. Though this shooting feels fine and is smooth enough to pass, the targeting system is odd and quite needless. Holding down the left trigger will cause you to lock on to your enemy and using the right stick allows you to choose which part of their body you want to shoot at. Pressing up on the stick locks on to the enemy’s head, while left or right targets either arm. The game notes that shooting the arms can cause the enemies’ reload time to be reduced but this ends up being useless considering a head shot kills them faster. What adds to this is the fact that combining different targeted attacks or aiming at specific body parts doesn’t reward the player with addition gun experience points. Never did I feel the need to shoot out the opponent’s arm because targeting their head allowed me to make the battles run much quicker and more fluidly.

Though the gun play can be pretty easy to learn, and you’ll easily be able to hold off an army of men, the mission objects you’re faced with will become extremely repetitive. You’re going to be focusing on two main objectives: cell strongholds and beacons. Cell strongholds aren’t required to complete but they task you with wiping out an entire cell controlled area in order to lower the number of enemies occupying a certain space. These can be useful to take on since you’ll find the enemy can be quite trigger-happy even when you’re just running by.

The main objective is reestablishing beacons set up by The Agency. These are similar to strongholds in which there are a ton of enemies around that must be taken care of. When enough are wiped out, you can activate the beacon by standing in close proximity to it for a set length of time. The time is shortened if you have a team with you that are all located within the beacons radius. This makes for a fun king of the hill type mission against the enemy cell but becomes quite tedious when you’re doing it for your sixteenth time in a row. For the most part in Crackdown 2, you’ll find yourself running into an enemy base and having to stay there long enough, or kill enough enemies before leaving. This works out at first but you’ll soon realize that you’re basically doing the same mission over and over.

However, the one good feature is the online co-op. The first Crackdown suffered from a broken and almost unplayable online mode and Crackdown 2 fixes this. Though, it should be noted that only the host gets story progression when playing with a friend so the only benefit to playing with someone else is increasing your level and finding more orbs – two things you can easily do by yourself offline.

Along with this, Crackdown 2 features some competitive multiplayer modes. Most are standard modes such as king of the hill and deathmatch. One downside is that the abilities and levels for your online agent are separate from your campaign, so nothing carries over. Despite the competitive aspect working out quite nicely, the idea of starting another agent from scratch when I already had a maxed out character elsewhere was a huge turn off.

An important thing to remember though is just how similar this game is when put beside its predecessor. It’s almost depressing just how similar these two games are and makes you really wonder what Ruffian was doing all this time considering the product. A lot of the animations are the same and, apart from the broken down and destroyed variations, the city is also set up just as it was before. You’re even doing the exact same type of missions. Apart from a bit of streamlining and some fixes, such as reworking the vehicles, you’re looking at a shinier Crackdown 1.

This isn’t to say Crackdown 2 isn’t fun. The leveling of your abilities is great throughout the game and will cause you to utilize each of your agent’s techniques. Along with this, the constant unlocking of new vehicles and equipment allows you more freedom in how you want to battle the constant waves of Cell or the freaks. Agility Orb hunting continues to be a great addition and with over 500 orbs to collect throughout the city, I found myself spending hours just jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Anyone who is into collectibles will enjoy this immensely. Though the missions do become quite repetitive, there are a small number side tasks – like rooftop races or vehicle stunt rings – to place in between the repetitive campaign. If you really enjoyed the first game, you’ll have great time with the second.

When it comes to my recommendation, I mark it as a pass. This is only because it is far too similar to the original game with not enough new and important changes. If you haven’t played the first, I still can’t recommend it since the first Crackdown can be bought for around $20 right now; whereas Crackdown 2 runs at full retail price. However, I can see this game hitting discount bins quite early and if you come across a $30-$40 price point, I recommend you pick it up.

Verdict: Pass It

Last Updated: January 17, 2025 - 08:20