Crackdown 2? More like LETDOWN 2!
By Thomas Hodgson

Crackdown 2 is a third-person open world shooter taking place in Pacific City, the zombie-infested love child of Eazy-E’s Compton and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, less the anti-Semitic hate rants. Fans of the original will feel right back at home, considering it’s the exact same concrete wilderness from the first title. Outside of a few visual updates and touches of color here and there, this lazy, repetitious design decision helps pave the way for a game seemingly comprised of nothing more than a comedy of errors steeped in mediocrity.

Your role as an agent is to assault 27 beacons throughout the city controlled by the Cell, the main antagonist. Activating three beacons in a network gives you the location of a Freak lair, a breeding ground for the abominations running the city amuck once night falls. To purge their presence, the Agency drops down large UV bombs into the Freak pits, which you must defend from the infected hordes as they arm themselves to explode. Dubbed “Project Sunburst,” it has far less flavor than combining lemon and cherry and leaves a bad aftertaste. Feelings of “Didn’t I just do this?” or “Not again…” are perfectly acceptable reactions as you work towards an ending you dreadfully anticipate will be as unrewarding as the gameplay itself.

Crackdown 2 is really just a bunch of busy work stapled together with the fact you can punch and shoot things. Aside from the pushover of a plot, everything else involves collecting orbs and audio logs scattered throughout the city or completing mindless race challenges. While collecting orbs is surprisingly addicting as your agility increases, allowing you to pounce from rooftop to rooftop, it’s just a guise that helps obscure the fact that Ruffian Games half-assed their way into your back pocket to grab $60 from it.

The multiplayer component of this game was good to try just to reaffirm how forgettable I thought it would be. It is this game’s tailbone, and while part of the body of work, it never sees much acknowledgement of its existence.
Although your Agent can jump to new heights, he doesn’t take this game with him to any of them. Everything will seem so rough and unpolished that it’s almost insulting you were made to pay for it. Melee attacks never chain together, the aiming system is atrocious, the visuals are remedial, driving controls play like tetanus, and the main campaign can be completed in roughly four hours. There’s no doubt that a minority of people will likely find some redeemable shred of enjoyment playing this game, but nothing contained on the disc is worth the price to search for it.

Pros:
• A quick fix for fans of the original
• Co-op is fun to punch your friends off of buildings
• Can kill things

Cons:
• Main missions can be completed in four hours, leaving you with an overwhelming sense of “Now what?”
• Literally the same locale as its predecessor
• Shoddy everything
• A sad excuse of a AAA title

Rating: 64%