The level of difficulty in game play is about average for a game of this sort, although even for first time gamers of this genre it’s not too hard to master. I found that fully independent controls for strafing, cameras and targeting gave me a far more manoeuvrable experience than I’m allowed in most games. The array of controls made playing a little confusing at first, but as I mastered the controls I found a greater ability to perform the actions I needed to perform. After a few false starts and a few headlong runs into walls, bouncing around the city became a lot faster and less demanding. I did find the constant targeting of the dead bodies of prior kills to be rather annoying, particularly when I was faced with a large number of opponents that were alive. Something I saw that made me fall off my couch laughing was when I threw a grenade at a Los Muertos bodyguard and it bounced off his head, knocked him over and landed next to him and then proceeded to explode. The last I saw of him was as his burning body crested the wall.
"Woooooooooooooooooooo! This is fun."
When I first started playing Crackdown the graphics were almost too polished, but as I worked my way through the game I spotted little glitches, but nothing I’ve seen so far has been truly bad. The occasional bad render of a car has seen me float in a sitting position at high speed down the highway. I enjoyed the day / night cycle that repeated as I fought my way through the legions of gang members throughout the city. The graphics in Crackdown add a lot of atmosphere to the game and I found myself stopping to enjoy the sunsets and sunrises a couple of times. In fact I spent time bouncing up buildings to the top of the agency tower so I could get an uninterrupted view of a wonderful sunset (I followed this up with a base jump for that extra feeling of achievement). Something I noticed that added an extra dimension was experiencing your eyes adjusting to light and darkness as you move into and out of particularly dark areas. It also added an extra dimension of irritation when running into a dark room of enemies that I didn’t spot before
The sound effects and the voices are good, but the music as you get into cars can get very annoying. I spent a lot of time in one area near a Volk gang boss and I got irritated by the constant repetition of the same phrases over and over when fighting them. This was unfortunately true of all the gangs as the majority of members were limited to a three phrase vocabulary. Something that the designers seem to have got from real life. It’s understandable that people can’t sit and create too many different phrases, but a few more would have been welcome. The sounds of gunfire are noticeably different when I fired different weapons although this seems to be pretty much standard with most games these days. Apart from that, the sounds of landing and exertion from my character were small touches that I felt added to the atmosphere. The single funniest line in the game came from one of the regular cops after I stole his squad car: "THAT’S NOT A RENTAL!!"
In the game you will aquire the strength to lift heavy objects and throw them.
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