Crackdown Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 7/3/2024)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Crackdown

Developer: Realtime Worlds

Publisher: Microsoft

Genre(s): Open-World, Third-Person Shooter

Platforms: Xbox 360

Release Date: February 20, 2007

As the modern open-world genre the Grand Theft Auto series pioneered evolved and still proved to have retained the lightning in a bottle that made GTA III so tantalizing, other developers would’ve been foolish not to capitalize on the trend that bought everyone at Rockstar their own beach house in the Hamptons. Naturally, quite a few derivative imitators splintered out of the woodwork that did nothing with GTA’s formula. They hoped that gamers either wouldn’t notice or mind that they were being served the same meal again and that they undermined their intellectual capabilities, but this is to be expected of the industry. Conversely, there was a crop of open-world titles I’d describe as “GTA alternatives.” Their gameplay identity was woven from GTA’s open-world fabric but did not adopt the full extent of the anarchic bloodshed and mayhem associated with the GTA series. An example of this rerendering of GTA’s scope and essence is Crackdown, an open-world title developed by RealTime Worlds and published by Microsoft as an exclusive for the then-budding Xbox 360 console. Crackdown’s status as a GTA substitute was especially applicable for my younger brother, who used to marvel at this game’s open-world design and its freeform applications. Once my parents rescinded their ban on playing GTA games once he reached a certain age, he purchased GTA San Andreas to celebrate the occasion, and his life was forever changed. Not once afterward did he humor returning to Crackdown to rekindle the joy the game had previously elicited. One could argue that his abandonment of Crackdown in favor of all things GTA-related rests entirely on the fact that the series’ unmitigated chaos wrapped in a package of edgy provocation is an unimpeachable facet that shouldn’t be removed from any open-world game with third-person shooter elements, lest the appeal is totally lost. However, I’d claim that Crackdown’s lack of lasting appeal is due to it fumbling plenty of other open-world aspects.

I should probably issue a disclaimer stating that while Crackdown isn’t as morally inflammatory as its inspiration, it is equally as violent. What Crackdown does to dial down the likelihood of middle-aged women stampeding towards their offices with pitchforks and torches in hand is rearranging the contextual scope of the bloodshed. Instead of playing as a hardened criminal lowlife, Crackdown puts the player into the role of an agent of justice trained to grind the scum from GTA into tomato paste. Considering all of the unbridled chaos infesting the streets of the fictional Pacific City to the point of total anarchy, Crackdown’s setting desperately needs a crime-fighting mortar and pestle. Specifically, a superhuman officer of the law who can handle the unabated bulk of criminal activity that runs as rampantly throughout Pacific City as the bubonic plague. Using the public's precious tax dollars, the police force agency has financed a dozen roided-out supersoldiers to painstakingly remove the three pervasive criminal organizations that have a corrupt stranglehold on the city. In this case, the player will select only one of many skins of the same beefcake variant from the main menu before starting the game. Maybe spraying dirtbags with magazines upon magazines of bullets will still amass outcries of ethical indecency, but I proclaim that this premise negates any feelings of offense or criticisms of its content from the same demographic that spurned GTA. I’ve witnessed too many moms on Facebook lionizing our boys in blue for performing dauntless acts of heroism in the name of keeping the peace. Forbidding their child to enact the same feats, albeit in the exaggerated realm of gaming, is textbook hypocrisy.

The Liberty City setting of GTA III was designed as a vague, general American city that coincidentally shared many iconographic and cultural parallels with New York City. The connections between a real American city and Crackdown’s Pacific City, on the other hand, is completely nebulous. All the geographical information we can speculate about this fictional metropolitan area is that it resides along the country’s Pacific coastline, likely sandwiched somewhere between the notable cities of southern California. One commonality that Pacific City shares with the Big Apple which GTA III built its architectural template is that its full perimeter consists of three island boroughs. The Den, The Corridor, and La Mugre (which translates to “The Dirt”) all link to one another through a series of bridges that build unity between their watery divides, with the towering, Tony Stark agency institution located on the center island as a conveniently placed hub for the player. From the agency’s garage-like corridors, the agent will drive their vehicle through an underground tunnel that soon releases out of the heart of the agency to the aortas clogged with criminal activity. As splitting the city into three separate districts would dictate, each borough of this chaotic hellhole is distinct from one another. La Mugre is the festive vacation district with a beachfront and hillside lighthouse, The Den is the industrial district that all of the factory and steel workers would ideally refer to as “the daily grind”, and The Corridor is the economically ritzy district that looks rather pretentious considering no one of elite stature would dare hang their hats here. Still, regardless of their individualistic constructs, every borough of Pacific City shares a commonality of dullness. Every environment in an open-world game is comparable to a sandbox, but Crackdown’s savage playground delves into some literal aspects of that comparison. The setting is nothing but a series of equipment with monkey bars and slides, or at least metaphorically speaking. Everything in the foreground, especially the buildings, exists solely as set pieces used to congest the space and give the illusion of a plausible urban area. However, each architectural construct found across the Pacific City zip code is as empty and hollow as a horseshoe crab shell that people keep as souvenirs. We’re intended to believe that this was once a thriving metropolis that crumbled when the illegal activity of the crime syndicates became too overwhelming to stabilize. Why then does every bit of architecture suggest that the gangs have erected all of these buildings themselves? They all seem built for the purpose of defensively hunkering down and waiting for the opposition to arrive, which is the perfect place for the goons of a criminal organization to lay low and bide their time. Parking garages are one thing, but there is no logic in the utter vacancy of a nightclub, car dealership, or the offshore, seaside mansion that rivals the extravagance of Scarface’s Miami penthouse. Vice City pinpointed exactly how that particular setting should have been rendered effectively one generation prior, which is another piece of evidence to my claim that Crackdown’s settings have no excuse for being this soulless.

To play devil’s advocate for a bit, I suppose that interior setpieces are a superfluous aspect of Crackdown considering that The Agent will be on call to dispose of the gangs surrounding the perimeter around the clock without any downtime. One gang faction entirely rules the roost per designated island borough. Los Muertos obviously calls the island with the Spanish name home, The Volk commands The Den with an iron fist, and the Shai-Gen Corporation is dominant enough to have captured the supposedly prestigious Corridor district for themselves. Each gang is also guilty of conducting their own unique brands of heinous, illegal deeds. Los Muertos provokes the DEA with their drug smuggling racket, The Volk’s anti-American terrorism sounds like a job for the DHS, and I’m sure the FBI would like a word with members of Shai-Gen after intercepting traces of their human trafficking ring and the inhumane experiments they perform on their victims. Each gang is also nationally distinctive as well, with Los Muertos stemming from Central America and The Volk hailing from Mother Russia. Shai-Gen is instead an amalgam of Americans with diverse ethnicities, and the members of this group remind me of 4Chan's /pol/ forum banding together and arming themselves like a militia. The Agent mows down minorities, commies, and internet trolls? This will practically make every middle-aged parent want to adopt The Agent as a son, despite the fact that he’d cave in the floor attempting to get into bed at night. Despite the many peculiarities the narrative displays, it’s a shame that the identities of each gang get boiled down to doll-sized NPCs shooting at the player while yelling generic threats at them in its gameplay.

The Agent will be bombarded by a ceaseless number of each gang’s goons while simply walking down the city streets, but erasing these fools from the criminal equation is akin to paying off an outstanding loan with pennies. In order to really slacken the damaging influence of each gang on their territory, The Agent must seek out their executive enforcers and promptly eradicate them. Upon reaching certain locations on the map through exploration, a video dossier will appear with the name and job description of one of the gang’s seven chairmen, and each of them is guarded by an army of subordinates in one of Pacific City’s abandoned structures. The trajectory the player intends to go through is taking down the six major constituents before tracking down the gang’s kingpin, and assassinating the head honcho will cause the gang’s last trickle of members to challenge The Agent to one final duel before their dominion fizzles out completely and the district can begin anew. One subtle aspect of the game’s open-world non-linearity is that the six essential figures leading up to the kingpin can be tackled in any order the player pleases, and their CEO can even be taken out of the equation before the player vanquishes all or any of his lieutenants. Hell, the player can even thwart the expected trajectory of grappling Los Muertos, The Volk, and Shai-Gen if they so please. I enjoy fracturing this course because it defies Charles Goodwin, the agency director and narrator of the game who gives me a migraine headache with his constant input. He’s Navi if the notorious fairy had a voice for FM radio, and if Navi was a condescending asshole who undermined the player’s confidence by informing them of the low odds they have at succeeding in dispatching a valuable gang member. Eat a dick, Chuck. Never tell me the odds!

Unfortunately, despite how it burns up my guts, it’s still wise for the player (especially new ones) to adhere to Goodwin’s shaky advice. Because bullets rain down like a deluge from all angles and arrays of explosives make each corner of Crackdown a volatile minefield, the player is likely to exhaust their health quickly or gradually due to extended periods of vulnerability. Even the “tough” difficulty, the mildest of the selections, will still see the extremes of Pacific City’s possible harm coming at the player without mercy. In order to adapt to this incredibly hazardous environment, the player will have to acclimate and evolve to the conditions, and this is a process that Crackdown overtly intertwines into its gameplay. Crackdown takes a note of inspiration from San Andreas’s RPG mechanics and applies them to five divergent attributes that are all perceived as vital to the act of fighting crime. Once the player guns down a gang member, blows them to smithereens with a grenade or rocket launcher, or shatters every bone in their body with a swift melee kick up close, tiny orbs whose colors coincide with a specific attribute will gush out of the enemy and fill their meters located on the left side of the screen. Crackdown is the only game I know in which running (specific) people over rewards the player and signifies the growth of one’s driving skill, but I digress. Be forewarned that achieved increments of one’s stats will be revoked if the player focuses their aggression on civilians or their fellow peacekeepers, but the overhead icons that indicate which NPCs are gang members will ensure that this penalty will likely be caused by an accident. The attribute entirely removed from rewarding the player with their militancy towards the gangs is agility, which is instead increased when they hop from building to building collecting the green orbs commonly located on the roofs. There are a total of 500 of these glaring collectibles scattered across all three islands, so I suggest practicing some squats and calf raises to make sure The Agent always lands on his feet. Actually, the “practicing” I’m alluding to is applicable for every stat, but the phrase I’d rather use that exposes the negative connotations behind it is my favorite of gaming’s extensive vernacular: grinding. The Agent’s success with each mob boss infiltration is predicated on how much time the player is willing to dedicate to hone their stats by waiting for gang members to antagonize them on the streets or by leaping from the city’s structures like a giant, cybernetic frog. The player can trade the insufficient weaponry that the agency supplies for the gang’s military-grade, black-market firearms, and explosives. However, maximizing The Agent’s stats is the only sufficient way to ensure victory against the squadron of henchmen stacked in the hundreds. San Andreas wisely placed its increasable stats to attributes unrelated to immediate progress, but Crackdown decided that the open-world genre was bereft of one of gaming’s most irritating and taxing contingencies.

[spoiler] When the player has shot, kicked, jumped, drove, and blasted off enough to the point where the boss feels they’ve earned the opportunity to take down Shai-Gen’s “Enigmatic Wang,” who resides in a skyscraper as “enigmatic” as the fucking Space Needle, all gangs will have raised a white flag and vamoosed out of Pacific City. In the state of relieving peace now due to the player’s efforts, Mr. Goodwin feels emboldened enough to reveal the sinister context behind the hidden consequences. Apparently, old Chuckles was the one facilitating the strength behind all three gang factions, and swiftly wiping them off the map was a premeditated plan for the public to give their allegiance to the agency as their protector, turning Pacific City upside down as an oppressive police state. Ah, here’s that satirical edge that keeps me from commenting further that The Agent is who old rednecks with the “blue lives matter” stickers think The Punisher is. Yet, I can’t quite swallow this twist. There is no foreshadowing beforehand, so the twist feels like a last-minute strike of substance. It simply feels too shoehorned to warrant the desired shock value.

The inability to go nuts and massacre all who live and breathe is not why Crackdown fails to impact the open-world genre like Grand Theft Auto did. Microsoft’s third-person police shooter still exudes that gratifying adrenaline even if the morals are more skewed to a black-and-white moral compass. However, the game is deprived of any narrative substance and its map is a vacuous lot where echoes can be heard for miles. Let us also not forget that Crackdown expects me to humor waging away on grinding to maximize proficiency, and I refuse to submit to this. By drawing GTA’s blood to another body, Crackdown still doesn’t resemble a fully fluid lifeform because its bones are too brittle to act with the same expressiveness. Crackdown just feels rigidly subdued in what is supposed to be a spirited and animated genre of game, which is why it only achieves an underwhelmed, moderately adequate result.