Crackdown - Micro$oft - Xbox360

[sidereal]

Hell yes it's fun.  If there's one thing City of Heroes has taught us, it's that grown men will play with paper dolls if you call it 'character generation'.  But if there's two things City of Heroes has taught us, the other one is that leaping over buildings is exhilarating, even if the buildings are arbitrarily spaced polygons.  There's something primaly joyful in jumping from rooftop to rooftop while traffic crawls hundreds of virtual feet below.  Crackdown offers rooftop jumping with a rocket launcher in your hands, so. . yeah.  Why aren't you playing it already?

You're a future-super-mega-cop who singlehandedly takes out three increasingly difficult gangs with your fists, bullets, fenders, and grenades across a sandbox city, GTA-style.  Unlike GTA, you don't have to hunt down mission vendors.  The missions come to you.  There's a passel of side-challenges of the 'collect 300 secret foozles' variety.  The only one that interested me was the agility beacon challenge, which involves hitting points across the rooftops to increase your agility score, which lets you jump further.  At maximum agility, you're jumping entire city blocks.  And firing a homing rocket mid-arc.  And dropkicking some poor bastard at the landing. 

Respawn points are very stingy, so don't die.  Console shooter mechanics are solved with a generous auto-lock mechanism.  Good times. 

The single-player campaign is short (~10 hours), so unless you're going to spend a lot of time gathering foozles on the rooftops, it isn't worth a full-price buy.  It's old, so you might be able to get it in a bargain bin.

Verdict: Buy It if it's discounted, otherwise Rent It.

[Azazel]

Nice use of the $ in Microsoft, btw. Do you also do that when discussing George Luca$ and so on?

I bought it discounted, though I haven't opened it yet. That's for a time sometime soon.

[sidereal]

Generally I'll go with Luca$$ for the double-whammy.  Also $ony, Chri$tma$, and delicious $a$$afra$ tea.

It occurs to me I over-estimated the length of the single player campaign, since I spent a good chunk of time foozle gathering and randomly jumping.  A straight run through without distractions would probably be 6 or 7 hours.

[Azazel]

As I've gotten older and my ability to earn money and buy useless shit like games has increased, while of course my spare time has decreased, I'm liking games that have about 10-15 hours gameplay in the no-frills SP campaign more and more. Especially in light of 30min-1-2-hour blocks of playtime, stuff like this will still take me a week or two to finish, and that's without exploring every inch of the cities etc (which I like to do if a game is fun). I still haven't finished Las Vegas in GTS:SA for example. Though I've barely touched it in the last 2 years..

So anyway, the SP campaign length on that sounds good to me.

[Hokers]

Crackdown is one of the best games for small time sessions.  With all the mini bosses and the plethora of things to collect (which all add to your skills) you cant help fut feel like you have accomplished things if you play for more than 10 min.  And blown a whole bunch of stuff up.

One of my favorite games from last year.

[DarkSign]

I always wanted to try that game..but I dont have a sexbox360.