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I'm a bit perplexed as to why I keep seeing reviews with reference tothe drug "crack". The game in my opinion has absolutely nothing to dowith drugs whatsoever. I believe Crackdown is a reference to the massive ass kicking that you deal out in this game.

What exactly get to crackdown on is in three different gangs.You'll be up against the Cai-Shen, The Volk and the La Muerta gangs.Each gang has its own set of talents so to speak. One will specializein the modification of cars; another will specialize in the dealing ofguns, and the last in the use of hit men.

While playing crackdown, you will pretty much be alone in yourquest. The local police provide minimal help while you are playing. Infact, if you take out too many civilians the police will actually turnon you and you become the hunted. This is a pretty easy scenario toavoid once you get used to playing and using all of your controls. Whatwould have made this a much better game is if the co-op allowed you toplay split screen with a fellow gamer. Unfortunately, you'll have twosystem link or use Xbox live, in order to play with somebody else.

Start crackdown and you will be instantly thrust into the action.If you have any GTA playtime under your belt you'll have no problemadapting to this game. In fact, there are many similarities between thetwo. You can lock onto your enemies, steal vehicles, and pick updropped weapons to use.

Letme talk about the lock on feature for a minute. You can lock ontoenemies even from far distances. What's nice about the lock on featureis you can select certain body parts to shoot at. Each body part willaffect your enemy in a different way. For example, if you shoot someonethey fall down onto the ground, and get up limping. Shoot someone inthe arm and they will drop their weapons. I'll let you guess whathappens when you shoot somebody in the head. If you said instant death,you guessed correctly. However, a headshot is not as easy as it sounds.When you lock onto an enemy, a reticule will start from a zoomed outposition and zoom in overtime. The amount of time it takes to zoom andis based upon the body part that you are targeting. Makes sense right?Aiming for and shooting somebody in the chest is a lot easier thenaiming for somebody's head and studying yourself before taking a shot.This is true in crackdown. The head shots will take somebody down inmore or less 1-shot however to zoom in for that headshot and beaccurate does take a significant amount of time. As in some games whereyou take out someone with a headshot and the enemies stand aroundlooking clueless that is not true in this game. If the enemies see oneof their comrades fall, they will begin to look for you and returnfire.

Stealingvehicles is similar to that of GTA. All you have to do is simply run upto vehicle and press your Y. button and you'll remove the driver of thevehicle and enter it. Each vehicle has its own characteristics.Originally, when you start out playing you are allowed to choose fromthree different vehicles that belong to the agency. You can choose fromthe supercar, the SUV or the big rig. Each of these cars as well havetheir own characteristics. If I was going to be driving anywhere, mychoice of transportation was the supercar.

Vehicles in crackdown have more purpose than just getting you frompoint A to point B. Again, similar to that of GTA, you can run overpeople. I offer a word of caution though. Driving some of these cars isa quick way to get the police after you by running over to manycivilians. It almost seems as the enemies dove out of your way fasterthan the civilians did. This makes a driving around town a bittrickier. The nice thing about running over enemies is that you canearn driving points.

Crackdown has a pretty neat point system. When you first start offyou start off at a level 0. You can increase your shooting ability,jumping ability, explosive ability, driving ability, and strength.Increasing each of these abilities has a significant effect on the wayyour character behaves in game.

Using the shooting ability as an example, the more enemies youshoot the more ability you again. Each time you dispatch an enemylittle icons will float towards your character and you willautomatically collect them. You don't even have to be near these icons.You can take out somebody with a sniper rifle from a great distance andthe icons will float towards you and end up being collected. As yourshooting ability gets better it will take less time to lock onto anenemy. The amount of damage or weapons to is also increased. Each levelup is significant. By the time you reach level four; which is themaximum level that you can obtain; your character will become an almostone-shot/one kill machine.

Increasing your jumping ability is a necessity in this game. Thereare certain areas of the game that are un-accessible until you reachthe fourth level of jumping ability. Your strength ability andexplosive ability are two other areas that you shoot work on achievingthe fourth level. The driving ability, I only obtained a second levelrating. I personally didn't see a reason to go beyond that level to butI suppose you could if you'd like. I'm sure there is some type ofachievement that will be unlocked once you reach your maximum level ofdriving ability. Again, I didn't see the need but to each his own.

There is quite a nice selection of weaponry in this game. You'llstart off with the basic handgun, assault rifle and hand grenades. Youwon't be limited to these weapons. As I mentioned before, you can pickup weapons that your enemies drop. In Crackdown there are safehouses which you will have to unlock . If you enter any safe house theweapon you are carrying will be automatically saved for future use. Asafe house also provides a rest point where you can refill your and anenergy and reload on ammo.

The game progresses quite nicely as far as difficultly goes. Thefirst sets of enemies from the first gang don’t pose that great of achallenge. Even the first sets of bosses don’t require much to takedown.

Ineach area there will be a set of generals that you will have to takeout. On top of them is the gang leader. Once you take out the generals.You can take out the gang leader. Eliminating all of the generals aswell as the gang leader will lead to one final quest. A riot it willhave broken out and it will be your job to quell that riot. Speaking ofgenerals and the gang leaders, there is one flaw. If you are able touncover the gang leader, which really isn't that difficult of a featonce you see the map layout, you can take them out first. I would haverather seen the gang leader be hidden or locked in tool you remove thegenerals from their power. Not a big deal but just something I thoughtwould have made the game play overall more refined.

There are three different areas and you will have to conquer themto give you an adequate amount of time to explore. The openness in theoverall game is just about right. It's not over expansive, nor is ittoo small where you find yourself seeing the same objects over and overagain. There are tons of those agility icons that are hidden all overthe games map. I probably collected close to half of them. I'm notquite sure what would be the purpose to collect them all again besidesunlocking an unnecessary achievement. Nevertheless, there are plenty ofthem around so that you can obtain level four on all of your abilitiesbefore too much time has passed.

Fighting the bosses was a hit or miss of difficulty. Some of thegenerals were even more difficult than the gang leaders themselves.Again, in each boss and general did provide more difficulty than hispredecessor in the previous level.

Overall, Crackdown was a pretty fun game to play. Itprovided me with about eight hours of game play before I had beaten allthe gang leaders and generals. If you are playing co-op with someone Icould only see that time been shortened. There is always Xbox live. Isuppose, in order to increase the replay value.

Crackdown actually had an ending. I was honestly pleasantlysurprised to see this. Most games develop nowadays, completely leaveout the ending and just give you a simple "the end". What happened tothe good old days of the Nintendo when beating a game sometimes gaveyou a cinematic 5 minute ending? After watching Crackdown’sending it appears we’re going to be in store for a sequel. If it’sgoing to be anything like its predecessor I’ll happily add it to mylibrary of games.

In the meantime, pick up Crackdown and give it a whirl.