Gaming Signal: Crackdown Demo: I'm All Tingly

Crackdown Demo: I'm All Tingly

Last week, Realtime Worlds released the demo for their upcoming super cop game, Crackdown. After playing a bit, I can say that the 'crack' part is right on.

Crackdown is, basically, a superhero game dressed up in a police outfit instead of tights. Think of it as GTA: VC mixed with City Of Heroes and Deus Ex. It's an open-ended, sandbox game, where you can do whatever you want to try and eliminate all the crime bosses scattered throughout the world. Every time you do something, the relevant ability increases a bit. This allows you to focus on certain abilities over others. Additionally, there are orbs scattered around that will increase specific abilities even more. Thus, like Deus Ex, you can focus on upgrading your guy how you want. Like CoH, you play the good guys fighting crime, and when your jumping ability goes up, look out. It's almost like Super Jump from CoH, and just as much fun. Since the demo times out at around 1 hour, I'm not sure if you will be able to max all your abilities during a complete game or not.

The other big kicker is that, like Gears Of War, Crackdown will has invite-in Co-op mode. You can be tooling around, grenading bad guys, see your buddy log in, send him and invite, and 'Bam!" he's in game playing along with you. That is sweet, and its almost as much fun seeing how much damage you can dish out on your buddy, which made my wife giggle as Tim and I were blowing each other up. See? Fun!

Now, I've seen some people online complain about the graphics. Yes, they are cartoony and yes they are cell shaded. But the look works well with the game, giving it a comic feel and the bright colors sure does make the scenery pop. Realistic graphics would have brought the 360 to it's knees when rendering 30 car explosions, and just plain wouldn't fit the theme. To all the graphics haters, its about the gameplay, not eye candy.

Crackdown wasn't even on my list of 360 games until I tried the demo. Now it's become an auto-buy when it comes out.

I will concur here JP, and point back to something that CliffyB said about Gears of War. Next generation games are not about the most photorealistic graphics - its about gameplay. I really wish these bloggers and others would focus on that instead of all glitz since we already know focusing on glitz gets you sub-average gaming in the case of Madden (which I will allow Trent to chime in on).

Posted by Tim on Wednesday January 31, 2007 at 4:42 PM