Civilians are a barely tolerable nuisance

February 26, 2007

Crackdown is far, far better than it ever really deserves to be. It's still not perfect - my Jordan rating scheme gives it a solid 3 stars - but it's a good start. As always, it's time for the negatives.

First off, the UI is just plain strange. It's not bad, technically, but there are so many bizarre design decisions that you wonder if this isn't a beta interface. As Penny Arcade noted, the font is terribly boring. Snoresville. You have your graphic designers invest so much time into creating this complex Heartless/Nobody logo for your game and you're using some generic system font? Shame. Shaaame.

Here's another thing that bugs me. Why doesn't the main menu change to indicate you have a saved game? Here's how it works: you start Crackdown, pick your difficulty and character ethnicity and are dropped into the city. You run around, complete some missions, save your game at an Agency Supply Point. Fine. Then you eject the disc, play something else, and come back. There's no "Continue" button to be found. The menu looks exactly the same. In order to resume where you left off, you: pick your difficulty and character ethnicity. Then you're dropped into the city with your old save. For all the "Saving content..." boxes they have in the game, you'd think it wouldn't be hard to let the player know you haven't forgotten him.

A third gripe? Certainly. The main method of gaining experience points in this game is killing bad guys. What experience you gain depends on how you killed them. If you shot them, you get gun experience. Ran them over? You get car experience. If you kicked their faces in, you get "physique" experience. When the bad guys die, little color-coded orbs fly out of their bodies and into yours, letting you know you collected the experience from them. The orbs fill up these five different meters at the top left of the screen. That's all well and good, but why aren't those meters color-coded to the orbs you pick up? And why, pray tell, are the four ranks of ability represented by plain-vanilla asterisks instead of a medal or a pendant or something graphical? And finally, if every car in this game runs on automatic transmission, why the hell is there an RPM meter?

Aside from all that, Crackdown is a lot of fun. There is absolutely no plot to speak of: you are superhuman police officer guy, go take down the big three ethnic flavored gangs. What you get instead is the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, pick up cars and throw them into gas tanks, and generally cause an extreme amount of damage and mayhem. My favorite part is definitely The Tick-style structural damage I cause to the roofs of buildings. Also it comes with the Halo 3 multiplayer beta, which is of absolutely no interest to me except as something to brag about. Blog about. What'd I say?

I think I owe the universe an apology. See, there was once this game called Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball. At the time I found it a harmless bit of M-rated fun. Watch women in skimpy bikinis bounce around to cheap pop music and play volleyball. Hey, I thought the volleyball was okay, even if half the swimsuits looked like they were assembled from dental floss.

But now the sequel is upon us and I shall repent for my sinful ways. No longer content with the Uncanny Valley, the perverts at Team Ninja have perfected the Obscene Mountain. Or, to delve into copyrighted works, Twin Peaks.

That there is such a thing as breast physics fills me with a terrible fear. Worse is that they absolutely screwed it up. Everybody likes breasts. What we hate, watching Dead or Alive Extreme 2, is balloons filled with rabid squirrels that move not only randomly, but out of sync with each other. You will stare in horror at the autonomous jubblies grooving to their own private beat. Sweat the new volleyball system that is either harder than the previous game or I've just gotten rusty. Wonder how they could make jet ski races less interesting than the original Excitebike.

This would be a perfect time to end with a kind of "and you sure will, because I'm never sending this game back" comment, but my heart's not in it. That thing sitting inside my game case is a monster, an abomination unto the Xbox. I need something to replace it with, but everything good is coming out for the PS2 or the Wii.