Crackdown: Full Game Hands-On Preview

We've put in hours with this massive and original Xbox 360 game for this new preview.

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The stories that carried the announcement of Crackdown and that followed its path through development couldn't help but mention that Realtime Worlds lead designer Dave Jones was one of the key players in the Grand Theft Auto series. This shorthand is an easy way to summarize the open-world aspects of Crackdown but it does the game a disservice by presenting it as something it's not.

For one, you're on the right side of the law this time around. Playing as a faceless member of a team of supercops, you patrol a rough city bloated with gangs, sub-bosses and bosses, all crawling within the decaying metropolis like maggots in a rotting corpse. The interesting thing about these particular maggots is that they live synergistically, and if you kill one, you affect the colony.

Consider, for instance, Rafael Diaz, a chop-shop runner for the Los Muertos gang. He is charged with creating new cars for his comrades, so when you kill him, you effectively garrotte any further vehicle development, and that affects the sort of vehicles you can jack. The same holds true for weapons, fighting and other aspects of the gangs. The order you tackle the bosses thus has a tangible effect on how you'll experience the game, which helps to give you a sense of power, knowing that your fate is at least partly in your hands.

Crackdown also has much more emphasis than Grand Theft Auto on running play rather than in-car action. While there are all sorts of vehicles to commandeer, it's the cop cars I found the most fun. Either way, I didn't use them much outside of the occasional point-to-point races you can take part in on the side. The mechanics of the vehicles are accurate enough that even in the December build I got to play the cars handle better than in Grand Theft Auto. That doesn't matter, though. Running (actually leaping) around the city is a more interesting way of getting about.

The landscape is littered with hundreds of power-up orbs that you collect to boost your stats. Gather enough of them and your physical attributes level up. This is most noticeable in how much higher you jump, though you run faster too. What begins as borderline-paranormal leaping quickly evolves into honest-to-god superhuman feats of athletic ability. And since these power-ups are there whether you're playing through the story or not, there's still a real sense of progression whether you choose to drive through the story or to look for as many orbs as possible.

Identifying with the character you're playing is ostensibly of little importance in Crackdown. You can choose between various characters - there is talk that a different main character will be pushed in each of Microsoft's various territories - but these don't have any effect on how the game plays, and you can switch between avatars on the fly. There's no personal story to be found here. You're just a cop in a tough town with a job to do.

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