The amount of on-screen characters that the game engine’s able to pump out is impressive. Crackdown 2’s not a horror game, per se, but I felt a definite chill run down my spine when I saw huge crowds of Freaks streaming down the streets. You’ll be able to mow down Freaks in any of the vehicles you can drive and they’ll meet satisfyingly gooey deaths. Random, emergent chaos is great but, oddly, I felt like there’s too much of it. It throws off the groove of exploring when a clutch of Cell terrorists suddenly pops up 10 stories above the city to shoot at you. The weapons, especially the Freak-specific ones like the UV grenades, feel nice and science-fiction-y. Leveling up to earn a new weapon increases the feeling of bad-assery you get as the game goes on. The cars don’t transform the way they did in CD1 but you’ll open up new ones as you play, eventually earning stuff like helicopters.
I experienced a serious bug when playing CD2 for review: namely, I wouldn’t be able to control my character after unpausing the game. You never realize just how much you rely on a pause until it starts screwing up. A screwed-up pause system makes it nearly impossible to do the things you need to strategize and chart your progress, like checking out objectives, or tactical locations on the maps.
There’s a few other troubling design decisions that plague Crackdown 2 as well. You can’t set down a waypoint to guide you, a big no-no in any contemporary open-world game. It’s too easy to kill civilians and Agency peacekeepers during firefights in the streets. There’s poor AI governing these NPC types and they get in the line of fire a lot. If you use the precise targeting auto-lock, you can’t toggle onto other targets. You can’t even move the reticule so it switches automatically. You’ve got to squeeze and un-squeeze the trigger to respond to multiple threats quickly. It’s a pain in the ass, given that you’re going to be blasting through increasingly dense crowds of people. And the targeting lock tends to focus on stuff like cars or explodables in the environment rather than enemies. It’s great that you want to make blowing crap up easier, Crackdown 2, but what I really want is to be able to shoot what I want to shoot.
Ruffian’s made clear that Crackdown 2’s focus is gameplay and not narrative. And that’s fine. There’s enough of a plot here to set up the action and give you a sense of the stakes. But the bigger problem is that the gameplay gets repetitive and even starts feeling tedious. The main quest’s got a rigid template: Find an absorption unit, kill the guys around it, do that two more times, go to the spot where the Project Sunburst beacon will drop, kill the guys around there. Lather, rinse, repeat. There are other mission types–sealing Freak breaches and taking over Cell bases–but they’re equally as rigid.
Crackdown 2 basically feels like it’s lacking polish and isn’t divergent or adventurous enough when compared to the original. The core mechanics are still addictive but I felt like I was fighting poor design choices or outright bugs in order to make any progress. For a game in a series that’s all about leveling up, Crackdown 2 comes across as terribly under-evolved.
Official Techland score: 6.5 out of 10