Crackdown Demo impressions

This enterprising youtuber pretty much sums up whats most fun about Crackdown. The sandbox genre needed some new blood, and the next gen horsepower combined with your abilities to lift and detonate anything in the gameworld are just what the doctor ordered.

You start out in a boring room, where you can grab one of four vehicles provided by your supercop garage. After a senselessly long drive in a tunnel, you land on a street corner in the middle of a firefight between gang members and police. I took this first oppurtunity to kill everything that moved, and it was much more satisfying than in GTA because the aiming system actually kinda works. It’s not great, but I’ll get back to that. Getting back in my car, I drove up the road and find that pretty much everywhere I go there’s gangs, so there’s lots of enemies to kill. I wasted no time finding alternate ways of dealing with this problem by running gangs over, tossing random items at them, using explosives. The visuals are much better than screen shots and even videos give them credit for. It’s a very vibrant world and the hint of cartoonyness keeps me from getting too serious and screwing around. I’m sure theres a target I had to kill here, but I spent all my time driving around, trying to scale buildings, and using whatever I had laying around to maul criminals and civilians.

I was never a fan of GTA. I didn’t think it played well, didn’t think it looked good, and the sandbox options were pretty much limited to driving and murder. Crackdown offers exploration and explosives, which are much more my bag.

The demo is currently on Xbox Live Marketplace, and according to Major Nelson, its already more popular than most full Xbox 360 games.