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Crackdown: Welcome back to the Agency, Agent
Sorenson
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Where do we even begin? From "that game that came with the Halo 3 Beta" to "that cool game they tacked the Halo 3 beta onto" to "awesome console staple with an awesome-looking sequal due out soon" Crackdown's had a rather interesting history of recognition over the years.
This is a war: a war on crime.
In a nutshell, Crackdown is a wide-open sandbox action game set in the island metropolis of Pacific City, governed over by the Agency, a world-wide taskforce formed from the merger of all police agencies to battle a disasterous rise in crime. Players take on the role of an Agent, a gene-tweaked super-powered officer of the law whose sole purpose is to eradicate crime, and cut a swath through hordes of opposition. Ushered in at a time where cartels and mafias threatened to throw the world into complete anarchy, the first Agents, instructed by the ever-watchful Agency Director, eliminated three ruling gangs that had all but absolute control of Pacific City: Los Muertos, the Volk, and the Shai-Gen Corporation.
They were also used as tools to usher in a new world order as part of a master plan by the Agency, but that's literily a last-minute reveal and Crackdown's not the kind of game you play for story, anyway.
The sequal, taking place a while after the first, brings players to a Pacific City infested by Freaks, monstrosities created by the same general process that created the Agents and freed during the events of the first game, which have infected the Pacific City populace to bring about a zombie nigh-apocalypse, in addition to Cell, an anti-Agency guerilla force that has mobilized during the development of the Freak disaster, and players are once again tasked with cleansing Pacific City of all its dangerous elements.
A better way of thinking of Crackdown is that it's like Robocop, but with the player being able to leap several stories through the air from rooftop from rooftop while raining down explosives and smiting people with everything from shopping carts to cars in true comic book and action flick fashion. Turned up to 11.
I like your style, Agent!
Crackdown isn't regarded very highly for its story: you're plonked down in the city, given an objective, and told to go do it with little other direction and prodding, leaving you absolute freedom in how to do it, from the approach to the execution. And this is where Crackdown shines. Do you go in all sneaky with a sniper rifle, picking your way along the route of least resistance before one final swift stroke to accomplish your goal? Or do you hijack a car and bust through the front door, mowing down every enemy along the way? Perhaps you go in guns'a'blazin and rockets'a'flyin', sending flaming mooks and debris every which way as you leap from rooftop to rooftop in single bounds? You can do all of the above or a combination of the above, and the only limit is your skill level and your imagination.
Crackdown encourages you to use as much overkill as possible and to push yourself to your limit, and even its achievements follow suit: juggle bodies through the air with missiles, cause as much carnage in as short a timespan as possible, and explore every nook and cranny from sea level to the city's absolute highest point. And best of all, you can do this cooperatively with other players: the original Crackdown has support for 2-player cooperative play through system link and Live, and the sequal expands this to 4-man teams (Live only, unfortunetily).
Skills for kills, Agent! Skills for kills!
The Agent isn't just some badass regular/near-regular human like in other games, but is instead a genetically-engineered one-man army. By leaping, shooting, detonating, beating, and running over enemies throughout the city, the Agent's abilities improve and evolve: they can run faster and leap higher, make more difficult shots with ease, withstand more damage and dish more out by hand, use vehicles more effectively, and make explosives more impressive by sheer will alone. Skill development is also reflected by the Agent's appearance: a new Agent will look relatively normal, but as their skills progress they'll develop into a heavily-armored Rambo-esque walking tank (or an old buff-as-fuck math teacher depending on what game and agent skin you use).
Skills are divided into 5 catagories:
Agility: the Agent's athleticism, improved by collecting Agility Orbs located throughout Pacific city and (very slowly) making attacks and leaps from impressive heights. Fully maxed out, an agent can go literily anywhere in the city they want to and cross entire blocks in a handful of bounds.
Firearms: the Agent's expertise with conventional weapons. The better the skill, the better the Agent's accuracy, being able to lock on faster and at better range without damage/accuracy dropoff.
Explosives: the Agent's knowledge regarding grenades and charges and rocket and grenade launchers. With improved Explosives skill comes bigger and better explosions (quite literily) and a max-level Agent can wreak absolute havoc with explosives, especially the more advanced weapons like cluster grenades and cluster/homing rocket launchers.
Strength: the Agent's sheer physical prowess, the higher their strength, the more damage they can shrug off and the more weight they can lift and the more damage they can dole out in melee combat. A max-level agent can shrug off gunfire from all but the heaviest of weapons and can toss around 10-ton semis like sand bags, if not using them to beat enemies to a pulp.
Driving: the Agent's skill with the use of vehicles: the higher the skill, the better control they have over vehicles and the better the stunts they can perform, as well as granting Agency vehicles improved performance and special abilities in the first game. Considering the extrordinary mobility gained with high Agility, most folks tend to neglect driving in the first game, but Crackdown 2 looks like it'll make developing this skill much more worthwhile.
New Agency intel, Agent!
Crackdown 2 was announced during E3 2009, and on June 21st the 30-minute demo went up for Live gold members. From everything we've seen thus far, the sequal essentially builds upon the first game and cranks it up to 12 this time around, including the Agency Director.
New features include:
* 4-man cooperative play through the main campaign and 16-man Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Rocket Tag modes!
* A reworked Pacific City, ravaged by the Freak hordes and the Cell insurgency: everything old is new again!
* Skills have been tweaked and enhanced: in addition to granting you more and better abilities, excellence also unlocks bigger and better Agency equipment and vehicles to use!
* New weapons and equipment, including Crackdown 1 DLC items like the Harpoon Gun, Flocket Launcher, and Agency Buggy and Armored Vehicle, and new entries like turrets (whose guns can be ripped from their housing for independent use with limited ammo) magnetic tethers (capable of connecting and slingshotting objects) Freak-centric weapons like the UV Shotgun and Grenade, and tanks and helicoptors to wreak havoc in!
* Vehicles and environmental objects can now be used in melee combat: nothing cuts through a mob like a lamp post swung like a baseball bat!
* More challenges and achievements to push the player's abilities, including Renegade agility and driving orbs that lead players on grand chases throughout Pacific City!
It's also had some rather enticing teaser material come out over the last year, too:
Whose side are you on, Agent?
The Crackdown games are great on their own, but bringing in some friends makes the chaos that much sweeter: more players means more possabilities, and some game features are enhanced or only available when playing with other folks.
Meta Tag: Friend up with PA Crackdown, and you'll be able to check out all the other likeminded PAers on Live in one convenient location. Make sure you send me a PM so I can remember to accept it, Lord knows I'll eventually forget or something else. EDIT: Since I've had my fill of Crackdown 2 for the time being and'm likely to forget about this, you can use the password skillsforkills to log in yourself and accept any friend requests you might've sent.
Individual Tags: Or if you're more of a traditionalist, a list of other players you can cherrypick for friendship and invites and whatnot. To get on the list, MAKE SURE YOU PM ME YOUR GAMETAG INFO, it's a lot harder to miss the new private message window than a post in the thread.
Forum Name: Gametag
Amnesiasoft: Amnesiasoft
Carbonfire: Carb0nFire
Doshino: Boomballshot
MayGodHaveMercy: Mercy XXVI
MrVyngaard: MrVyngaard
Pilgrim: Quite Absurd
Sorenson: Jolly Junker
ThingInYrCloset: ThingInYrCloset
Threepio: Threepio
Trednis: Rudy the tall
You've got what you need. Now get out there and kick ass!
Sorenson on
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Posts
Cleaned it up a tiny bit.
EDIT: Add my GT to the OP as well. I might not have it day one, but I'll get it soon after. Mercy XXVI
I am a freaking nerd.
Infinite time!
It's in the video description, not the video itself, but you can see his clock frozen at 30:00. You can also see that he has like 4 levels in every skill.
Gonna play a game of CD2. Back in 6 hours or so.
Steam - Partizanka | Live - Partizanka
I think they specifically addressed this. Some stupid story about having to render too many different objects or something (which is why they removed the morphing car too I guess?). I don't know, it was a really stupid excuse.
I know alot of people hated the driving in Crackdown, but it was probably my favorite part.
Personally I found that the only thing that made the driving decent (esp. if you got the DLC cars).
Honestly, after level 2 they'd probably look like the dudes anyway.
There all the same but increasingly ugly colours.
Lack of memory's the reason they gave. I guess that's why there's only one suit/body now, too. It's not really that stupid a reason - the 360's only got 512mb of RAM, after all, so cuts have to be made somewhere.
I finally got back into the groove last night, after running through the demo a few times without much happening. I parked myself on top on a passing minivan and blasted it along the road with the UV shotgun while yelling at it to go faster! All fun and games until it careened off the road and straight into some barrels... I don't think it'll ever go fast again.
lame
double lame
i was gonna rock light grey anyways
Crud, do they have them shown any place? :?
But I did spend the last 15 minutes beating people to death with a mailbox, so I'm pretty sure I've experienced the true spirit of the game.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
For anyone who doesn’t have a 360 to play the demo, the game itself is a weird mixed bag. The shooting’s improved from the first one- enemies take cover, and it’s easier to fine-tune your aim for headshots. Melee combat is also a bit better, with a multiple-hit combo and being able to use any object you can pick up as a weapon, rather than just throwing them. Driving feels a bit more like that of a racing game, although it’s definitely easier just starting out than the first game, and there are some cool new vehicles with turrets and such.
The texture work seems worse- the first game was very clever with its use of detail textures that could degrade to large blocks of color at distance while looking the same. Either due to less-clever art direction or engine limitations, textures at medium distance in this seem to become kind of a blurred mess to a far greater extent. The explosions are also kind of fuzzy/soft looking. It’s still fun to set off a large chain of them, though.
The new mutant enemies that come out at night are fun to run over or throw large objects at, but fighting them otherwise mostly just involves tapping melee repeatedly to do the combo (or to swing a lamppost around). The mutants in the first game were actually more of a threat with their one-hit knockdowns. Maybe it’s different on the higher difficulties.
The Agency Director’s voicework sounds less convincing, even though they supposedly got the same guy. He just sounded more gruff and authoritarian before.
There are a couple weird issues that I can’t believe made it this far into the game’s development. As far as I can tell you can’t melee while locked onto someone, and you don’t automatically gun-butt enemies when you try to shoot from up close. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to use the supply points except by dying, but I may have missed that, or it’s a demo limitation. It doesn’t show the names of the tracks you play in the cars. The grappling up buildings is also kind of weird- the agent misses grabbing things he should be able to for no apparent reason, and then sometimes grabs odd angles you wouldn’t think he’d be able to, also arbitrarily. The ability to vault over ledges when you’re inside a balcony does fix a major problem with the first game’s climbing, though.
Probably my main issue with the game is that they seem to have taken the original game’s actual city geometry and retextured/modified it for the new more post-apocalyptic setting. I was originally fine with it being set in the same city, since I assumed they would be building it from scratch, but this just seems lazy.
This is more personal taste, but my other main issue is that I don’t like the art direction that much. The first game had kind of a colorful, violent comic-book thing going on (which worked well with the loose but solid physics and the large-blocks-of-color texture work), this game’s palette just seems a bit closer to the generic grimy grays and browns of most shooters. The “post-apocalypse” theme isn’t even that pervasive, mostly limited to the occasional flaming window, rubble pile, or Mad Max-esque vehicle randomly strewn about.
Basically, this team of developers doesn’t seem to be as talented as Crackdown’s, but had a pretty solid foundation to build on, so even if it is kind of a Frankenstein’s monster of stuff bolted on to the first game, it will still be fun.
Yeah, he sounds a lot more... gleefully happy about violence, or something, than he did in the first one.
I should probably try out this demo soon, I loved the first game. It was great to just chill out collecting orbs and booting gangsters off roofs.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Good times. Need more agility orbs
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
The first thing I noticed was that the visuals weren't exactly phenomenal. The second thing I noticed, five seconds later, that dominated my mind for the whole demo was, "Why do I feel such an impulse to please the voice in my head, and receive praise from him? How did I become such a tool?"
It's a mystery, one I did not expect.
I can deal with that. After all, at the end of the last game
Dude, Michael McConnohie IS the voice of the Agency. I don't think anyone would be able to pull off that kind of smug authoritarian voice like he does. After all, he's provided the voices for such magnificent bastards as Van "Master Badtouch" Grants in Tales of the Abyss, Emperor Charles Britannia in the anime Code Geass, and Seth in SF IV. The guy knows how to egg you on in just the right way.
Edit: To be fair, Crackdown was the first time I'd ever heard his voice, so whenever I recognize him as a character I can't help but subconsciously imagine them punctuating every line or command with "Agent".
Also, you don't have to unplug the cable as you select yes. You can just do it once that "Are you sure you wish to use this agent?" screen pops up. The second set of instructions I posted on the last page explains it the best, I think.
He strikes me as much more intense this time around. Less subtle, more batshit insane.
For some of the supply points, you have to take out two of the Cell Strongholds. Stand in the Giant Red Cell Logo and hit <Back>. Once you clear the area, a chopper will drop off some agents. If it says Strongholds in this area: 1 of 2, it means you also have to take out the other one. Once you do that, you will have an agency supply point you can stand on and hit <Back>. You can then call in a vehicle drop, store a vehicle, or get a new loadout.
I do believe a good portion of this crew did work on the original Crackdown. Not sure how many of them, though. Good review. I agree with most of it.
Also the lockon is fucking infuriating sometimes.