Kevin Alexander-

Like mostly everyone else that I talk to, I'm hopelessly addicted to this game. I've been describing it to people as "GTA Exaggerated" since it has the sandbox feeling mixed with guns and cars, only this time you're taking out the bad guys instead of taking them over. What makes it exaggerated are, of course, the power orbs. These little bastards have kept me glued to my 360 at every possible moment. Last night I spent time trying getting to as high a point as possible (collecting the green agility ones along the way) and then using the sniper rifle to take out the gang members below (getting the blue gunfire AND green orbs). It's a blast watching your character change as your skills increase since the higher his skills rank the more exaggerated your actions get. Just jumping from building to building never gets old and it has become my favorite way to travel.

Usually in a GTA type game if you have to go across town you nab the first quick car that goes by and zip on over. That's not the case in Crackdown, I prefer to just leap on over. It's almost quicker to do this since the driving mechanics leave a little to be desired, which is a shame because the rest of the controls are so tight and natural. I love the way that you can pin point where you shoot someone. You can aim at either arm, the chest, legs or head giving you a variety of ways to kill someone.

Crackdown also employs an interesting art style that is part cell shading mixed with natural environments, with beautiful lighting and a robust engine that never needs to load after you start the game. Draw distance is excellent and the character animations are fluid. I've noticed that the NPCs also adjust to what I'm doing in smart ways, which makes it a little more challenging. During one of the driving races I was quite reckless at first and unfortunately I took out many civilians. As I neared the end of the race the streets had emptied out to make way for my antics, or at least that's what I assumed. It's seems there's a lot more to this game than the Halo 3 Mulitplayer Beta after all.

Greshkov-

What do I think about Crackdown? I absolutely love this game. The combination of super-hero antics with Grand Theft Auto debauchery and a twist of rpg make Crackdown a more than guilty pleasure.

I don't usually play games in the GTA mold because I find them to be too open ended and I lose interest fast, but this game address all of those short comings. If I don't feel like taking out a crime boss, I just look for agility orbs. I spend hours just running around, jumping from roof top to roof top looking and listening for little green orbs. It's such an addiction that I'm starting to hear their glowing sound when I'm not even playing the game.

The game also does a great job of giving me so many bad guys to kill, that I never get bored and starting killing innocent people and seeing how long I can evade the cops. I only kill them when they hit me with their cars or don't get out of my way when I'm running somewhere. I'm sorry, but If a giant guy leaps off of a roof top, cracks the ground in front of you, and starts running at you with a gun... move. If not, expect to get kicked into on-coming traffic.

I also enjoy that the game was a respectable length. These game don't need to be one hundred hours long with seventy plus missions and a shit-ton of side missions. I just want to kill the mess out of people, and be done in like ten hours. That's all the patience I have for these games.

The only things that kind of bothered me were the camera a few times when I was trying to see where I was jumping, and the targeting system

would lock on to dead bodies before living ones. The former isn't anything to lose sleep over, and the latter I can understand because it's a lot of fun abusing dead bodies. They're just just little nit-picks that keep the game from being perfect. If you've got a long weekend, and sixty bucks burning a hole in your pocket, buy this game.

It's better than watching a fox kick a cats ass.

Dan Zuccarelli-

Let’s get this one thing out of the way at the very beginning; Crackdown is a one-trick pony of a game. But it does that one trick so well, and the rest of the game relies on tried and true game mechanics that you don’t mind in the least.

That one trick? Mad hopping skills. It’s true your aim, strength, driving, explosive abilities all grow over the course of the game as well, but none of those talents can even compare to the rush of jumping from rooftop to rooftop, or leaping tall buildings in a single bound, or climbing up a skyscraper to escape a firefight.

In co-op, everything is just twice as nice. Since there’s NO STORY whatsoever, it frees the game up to just stick to the "get rid of the crime in the city" missions, which can work with one player or two. What works so well about the co-op is the fact that while you’re playing together, you’re not stuck following each other or tackling the same thing at the same time. It plays exactly like the single player campaign, except that there’s someone else close by that’s blowing up the same amount of crap that you are. For hours on end friends and I played together, sometimes going 20-30 minutes not really saying much to each other, just each kind of doing our own thing in the world. I was enhancing my explosive ability; he was bounding around grabbing agility orbs. When one of us went after a crime boss, or got into a hairy firefight, we’d call the other in for backup. It worked fantastically well, working in tandem and separately seamlessly.

So there ya go, positive all around. Turns out it's not just a vehicle for getting the Halo 3 beta (which personally none of us REALLY care about).

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