My Weekend: Crackdown

 Gah! The whole weekend spent playing Crackdown! What has the world come to!?

Crackdown does a bunch of stuff phenomenally well. I've had to think, I've had to react quickly, and in some areas I've just had to sandbag my way through.

Climbing up the sides of buildings is great fun, and the puzzles involved - like getting to some of the 4-rated Agility Orbs high up on the skyscrapers in the corporate district - have been both frustrating and rewarding, all at once.

In some ways (possibly just Leg Augmentation ways), it's reminiscent of Deus Ex to me. I've retyped that sentence (and a few others) about thirty times now trying to get the sentiment correct, but I can't, so I'll leave explaining that as an exercise for the reader!

The bottom line is... it's just great fun to be able to scale tall buildings in multiple toehold-scrabbling bounds, destroy countless enemies (er, I can count to five, actually) at once with a well-placed rocket blast, and plow through traffic in the Agency truck cab.

For a sandbox-style game, there's also a noticeably larger-than-average amount of persistence - enemies spawn and respawn, but cars and other damaged items tend to linger much longer than, say, GTA.

I am a bit worried that once I finish the missions, there won't be any gangs left to destroy for more stats increases; guess I'll just concentrate on getting to that point first... And again, I guess there's always Co-Op multiplayer...

So, um, four agility orbs out of five. Stonking good.