Crackdown

The focus on jumping around buildings and upgrading skills with use on the fly still stands out quite a bit today that you forget how wonky the jumping can be, or how limited enemy interaction really is. Crackdown has enough cool setpieces and engineered level design against a bevy of emergent watercooler moments to take its place in the open world pantheon, and rightfully catapulted Michael McConnohie to the top of the voice actor food chain. It can all get grating after a while, however, without much understanding for conventional challenge or pacing.

Looking back at it after a decade and change of open-world as the norm, Crackdown is such an odd game. The arc of open world development has been away from the idle goofing of the sandbox and towards developing linear experiences to discover. The modern open world game is a vast box of canned experiences, large and small, and innovation has come from making those experiences grander, deeper, and more narratively fulfilling. Yet Crackdown, a game where the most deep interactions are "find orb" and "kill guy", might just be my favorite.

Crackdown is an extremely simple, even surface-level game. From the word go, the game presents you with the five things you can do - shoot, run around, throw grenades, drive cars, and kick people. Then, and with very little in the way of guidance, it tells you you have 21 people to find and kill and leaves you to it. No side quests, no scripted sequences, not even a true campaign.

It might sound a little unpolished, and it is, but that lack of scripted sequences allows for immense player freedom. The baddies are locked in big houses you have to find - once you do, your goal is to use the level geometry to find a way in and then choose how you want to clear out the space. It creates the same feeling as an immersive sim, even if there's none of the mechanical depth at play. (The RPG systems also help here - your level ups feel really weighty and impactful, and so you really do find yourself mixing things up. You'll end up killing a whole area just by kicking everyone, or suiting up with a rocket launcher and blowing everyone to smithereens.)

It's also just a great world to explore in general, filled with colorful level-up orbs and interesting locales. Pacific City is small enough that you can easily stumble into everyone, but it's also large enough that there are clear districts with fun details and exploring really feels worth it.

Crackdown isn't perfect. For one, it's just kind of un-PC - of the five female drug bosses you fight, two (arguably three) are implied to be evil sexy criminal recruiters / possible prostitute-runners, one is a steroid-abusing former athlete, and even the last one is implied to have seduced another boss. At one point you find one of them and the voiceover just calls her a bitch. Police do suck but that's a little on the nose.

There's also just the normal kind of problems. Camera issues mean fighting in corridors is basically impossible, which to be fair the game is clearly aware of and designs around. Targeting has no switch feature. The game's structure incentivizes being risky and trying to kill the kingpins early, but there's no reward for doing so. Driving as a skill just doesn't matter, both because leveling it up isn't especially important and because cars are pretty niche and usually worse than running if you want to boost your agility (which you should, that's the most fun part of the game.)

It's a shame, then, that no Crackdown sequel to my knowledge has ever really fixed these issues, and they probably won't in the future. Crackdown's peak of quality would be going in the opposite direction from where the rest of the open world, and that would require a creative leadership I don't think Crackdown will ever get. But at least we did get this one truly excellent game out of it, one I have loved since I was a child and still love today.

In an era when GTA reigned supreme and the clones were coming hard and fast, no game took the basic formula and brought it in a more unique and successful direction than Crackdown. For while the basic premise is there -- an open world filled with gang bangers and innocent bystanders and vehicles and explosives and the sandbox mayhem one could create with these elements -- Crackdown painted it candy colored and set it in a dystopian, police-state future. If GTA wanted to be Boyz in the Hood (or Goodfellas if we're talking about Vice City), Crackdown wanted to be the Judge Dredd comic book: fascist, almost super human law enforcement struggling to maintain control over a violent, hyper-capitalist, garish neon nightmare of a city.

It's not just the setting where Crackdown stands on its own, the gameplay adds upgradable stats to your character, particularly in your run speed and jump height, which changes the game fundamentally from a grind-it-out third person shooter to something far more fast and fluid and vertical. Your early game will mostly be spent running and driving around the map, while the mid and late game sees you frequently in the air, scaling the sides of skyscrapers and leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Crackdown goes up as much as it goes left and right, which was positively unique in 2007, half a year before the Assassin's Creed series hit the scene.

Absolutely one the most original and groundbreaking games of the 360/PS3/Wii era, and certainly one of my favorite.