Long time no postee...
Crackdown
One of the following sentences will be central to this review. Feel free to ponder which it could be as you read them- for extra points, try and spot the common theme which links each sentence:
i)Let them eat cake.
ii)You can't have your cake and eat it.
iii)The cake is a lie.
Easy, wasn't it? Too easy, for a person as intelligent and handsome as you. The common theme is that each sentence was preceded by a Roman numeral in brackets (as the author I can promise that any other similarity was wholly coincidental).
Take another glance at sentence ii). It is, depressingly enough, a truism in life that you can't have it both ways, whatever those ways may be. You can't skive off school because you forgot to do your homework; you can't have a lightsaber, because they're only for Jedi's, and APPARENTLY they're not 'real'. And obviously, you can't jump off a skyscraper, fire a heat seeking missile launcher at a car full of mafia goons, land on a truck, pick it up and throw it at some innocent bystanders who you've developed an irrational but irresistible dislike to because...what?...I CAN do the last one? Awesome. Don't suppose there's any chance of getting me a lightsaber as well? No? How about 'instead of'? Still no? Alright, alright. Better than a kick in the balls though...speaking of which...
'Better than a kick in the balls' sums up the reaction of many people who bought Crackdown. Expectations were not high: for many it was a free bonus game they got after shelling out £40 for access to the Halo 3 beta, kind of an inverted Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. But you know what? Crackdown's brilliant. It's abso-cocking-lutely mental, and it doesn't care who knows it. Ironic, perhaps, that it was packaged with the Halo 3 Multiplayer beta- Crackdown offers maybe ten hours of fun, but not much more: Halo 3 Multiplayer will be played until the Horsemen of the Apocalypse decide to make an entrance, the sun goes supernova, or Halo 4 comes out (maybe they'll all happen at once- that's gonna be one hell of a weekend: 'wait a sec, Pestilence, need to finish this Capture the Flag...woah, could you dim the lights in here? Can't see the screen...')
Crackdown hits you like...well, a bit like that kick in the balls someone mentioned earlier. You select an angry looking avatar (possibly bald: most definitely angry). Strong but silent type- think Gordon Freeman spliced with freerunning on LSD. You proceed to wander around a big ol' cartoon metropolis, happily murdering ethnic stereotypes until the game tells you the plot is over. But what a stunningly realised metropolis! It evokes a special type of joy medical experts call 'Jet Set Radio Future Super Happy Time'. The most superficial likeness is the cel-shaded beauty of both games, but a common structural trait is you can be sure that, if you can see somewhere, you can go there. Things start diverging when you consider that in JSRF there are certain semi-sensible limits about what can be done: you can do precisely what a cel-shaded, weirdly attired, ambiguously gendered skater ought to be able to do, within the logic of the game. But Crackdown, Crackdown turns the speaker up to 11...then throws the speaker through a wall and then lobs a grenade through the hole in the wall and then shoots whatever is left with a machine gun.
Like my mother always told me, view distances are important. On a practical level a good draw distance will let you whip out a sniper rifle and forcibly implement a cessation in some unlucky twits respiration from four miles away. But like a wrestler who dabbles in flower arranging, Crackdown has a surprising understanding of the importance of aesthetics. It allows- actually, it encourages- you to climb up to the top of a skyscraper, leaping from the ground, 25 feet in the air, grabbing onto a windowsill by your finger tips and hauling yourself up the side of the building (surprisingly nimble for such a big guy) for little better reason than to see the view. And the view distance is such that you can look in a direction and just see everything there is to be seen. As a child reared on a strict diet of Xbox Morrowind, this always strikes me as a wondrous luxury.
Scattered throughout the map are 500 green orbs which can be collected to incrementally level up your agility. There are also various other colours of orbs for leveling up your strength, your skill with explosives, your accuracy, your touch-typing ability and your driving skill: these are all gained from using the relevant skill on passing thugs...and particularly ugly civilians, if you're in a foul mood, although you'll get no orbs from civilians, tight bastards to the last. Ostensibly these orbs help encourage the player to explore this urban playground, although I don't know what kind of morose wanker, when handed this super-agent to use as he sees fit, would actually look at a skyscraper and go 'Pfff. Don't really wanna climb that. Probably rubbish up there. Think I'll go for a drive instead.'
...(Seamless segue)...
Which brings us, pootling along sadly but inevitably, into the land of flaws, and as implied by my seamless segue, driving is a resident in that land. Driving in Crackdown is boring. Like everything in Crackdown, it's a Catch-22: if you don't do something, you'll never get good at it, but you're unlikely to ever do it if you're no good at it. Thing is, running around lobbing grenades and leaping off skyscrapers and touch-typing a Word document are innately fun activities- I'd do them all the time if I got the chance. But the driving...it feels so initially clunky, when it's not been leveled up, that there's simply no reason to upgrade it. Why drive the streets like some unimaginable loser when you could be bounding from rooftop to rooftop like a bald badass dude with somewhere to be (probably a date with a hot lady...who you'll throw a car at! 'Cos that's how you roll!)? Knowing this, the developers tried to spice the driving up; streetraces litter the cities like discarded johnnies; purple rings float tantalisingly in the sky, normally in proximity to something ramp shaped, just begging to have a car propelled through them and cause Freud to get all excited and fidgety. Did these ring things convince me to convince myself I found the driving interesting? No sir, they did not.
But fuck it, and fuck the naysayers. Crackdown's all 'Hey, hey you! Are you saying nay?' 'Well, yes I am...' 'Well fuck you!' Crackdown knows what it's about, and it doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is, unlike some recent Bioware space RPG's. Naming no names. It's a game about finding orbs, normally by shooting someone in the head until orbs fall out. It's about climbing that skyscraper to see what the view's like. And it's got a sense of humour as it goes about it. Like a certain portal shooting extravaganza of brilliance of late (narrows it down), it understands the importance of a good narrator. Explode too many bus-loads of orphans and the narrator will remind you that civilians, whilst often an intolerable nuisance, are not there for you to slaughter. But you can tell he doesn't mean it. Granted, the narrator gets a bit repetitive a bit quick, but that just reminds you that you should be done playing this game by now and doing something else: 'go on, go play that Halo 3 beta you've been weeing yourself about' it taunts you. And you think 'oooh, maybe I should. I could do with brushing up on my Spartan Laser before tea-time'. You reach for the power button, but then it hits you, right in your long suffering balls: 'Won't somebody please think of the children?' 'Yes...' you say,'Yes. Think of all the children... who I haven't driven a rocket powered supercar over yet. Think of all the children I've yet to stick a limpet mine to, and then juggle in the air with my rocket launcher. Think of all the children that are sitting safely at home, having never been thrown off the top of a skyscraper...by me.' If not you, agent, then who? You sit back in your chair, briefly chastise yourself for your dereliction of duty by giving your balls one last, swift punch, and get back to work...
And so, like a trained worm leaping through tiny hoops for it's master (possibly hoops made out of Polo's), I provide the following two word summary of the above:
Buy it.
Crackdown
One of the following sentences will be central to this review. Feel free to ponder which it could be as you read them- for extra points, try and spot the common theme which links each sentence:
i)Let them eat cake.
ii)You can't have your cake and eat it.
iii)The cake is a lie.
Easy, wasn't it? Too easy, for a person as intelligent and handsome as you. The common theme is that each sentence was preceded by a Roman numeral in brackets (as the author I can promise that any other similarity was wholly coincidental).
Take another glance at sentence ii). It is, depressingly enough, a truism in life that you can't have it both ways, whatever those ways may be. You can't skive off school because you forgot to do your homework; you can't have a lightsaber, because they're only for Jedi's, and APPARENTLY they're not 'real'. And obviously, you can't jump off a skyscraper, fire a heat seeking missile launcher at a car full of mafia goons, land on a truck, pick it up and throw it at some innocent bystanders who you've developed an irrational but irresistible dislike to because...what?...I CAN do the last one? Awesome. Don't suppose there's any chance of getting me a lightsaber as well? No? How about 'instead of'? Still no? Alright, alright. Better than a kick in the balls though...speaking of which...
'Better than a kick in the balls' sums up the reaction of many people who bought Crackdown. Expectations were not high: for many it was a free bonus game they got after shelling out £40 for access to the Halo 3 beta, kind of an inverted Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. But you know what? Crackdown's brilliant. It's abso-cocking-lutely mental, and it doesn't care who knows it. Ironic, perhaps, that it was packaged with the Halo 3 Multiplayer beta- Crackdown offers maybe ten hours of fun, but not much more: Halo 3 Multiplayer will be played until the Horsemen of the Apocalypse decide to make an entrance, the sun goes supernova, or Halo 4 comes out (maybe they'll all happen at once- that's gonna be one hell of a weekend: 'wait a sec, Pestilence, need to finish this Capture the Flag...woah, could you dim the lights in here? Can't see the screen...')
Crackdown hits you like...well, a bit like that kick in the balls someone mentioned earlier. You select an angry looking avatar (possibly bald: most definitely angry). Strong but silent type- think Gordon Freeman spliced with freerunning on LSD. You proceed to wander around a big ol' cartoon metropolis, happily murdering ethnic stereotypes until the game tells you the plot is over. But what a stunningly realised metropolis! It evokes a special type of joy medical experts call 'Jet Set Radio Future Super Happy Time'. The most superficial likeness is the cel-shaded beauty of both games, but a common structural trait is you can be sure that, if you can see somewhere, you can go there. Things start diverging when you consider that in JSRF there are certain semi-sensible limits about what can be done: you can do precisely what a cel-shaded, weirdly attired, ambiguously gendered skater ought to be able to do, within the logic of the game. But Crackdown, Crackdown turns the speaker up to 11...then throws the speaker through a wall and then lobs a grenade through the hole in the wall and then shoots whatever is left with a machine gun.
Like my mother always told me, view distances are important. On a practical level a good draw distance will let you whip out a sniper rifle and forcibly implement a cessation in some unlucky twits respiration from four miles away. But like a wrestler who dabbles in flower arranging, Crackdown has a surprising understanding of the importance of aesthetics. It allows- actually, it encourages- you to climb up to the top of a skyscraper, leaping from the ground, 25 feet in the air, grabbing onto a windowsill by your finger tips and hauling yourself up the side of the building (surprisingly nimble for such a big guy) for little better reason than to see the view. And the view distance is such that you can look in a direction and just see everything there is to be seen. As a child reared on a strict diet of Xbox Morrowind, this always strikes me as a wondrous luxury.
Scattered throughout the map are 500 green orbs which can be collected to incrementally level up your agility. There are also various other colours of orbs for leveling up your strength, your skill with explosives, your accuracy, your touch-typing ability and your driving skill: these are all gained from using the relevant skill on passing thugs...and particularly ugly civilians, if you're in a foul mood, although you'll get no orbs from civilians, tight bastards to the last. Ostensibly these orbs help encourage the player to explore this urban playground, although I don't know what kind of morose wanker, when handed this super-agent to use as he sees fit, would actually look at a skyscraper and go 'Pfff. Don't really wanna climb that. Probably rubbish up there. Think I'll go for a drive instead.'
...(Seamless segue)...
Which brings us, pootling along sadly but inevitably, into the land of flaws, and as implied by my seamless segue, driving is a resident in that land. Driving in Crackdown is boring. Like everything in Crackdown, it's a Catch-22: if you don't do something, you'll never get good at it, but you're unlikely to ever do it if you're no good at it. Thing is, running around lobbing grenades and leaping off skyscrapers and touch-typing a Word document are innately fun activities- I'd do them all the time if I got the chance. But the driving...it feels so initially clunky, when it's not been leveled up, that there's simply no reason to upgrade it. Why drive the streets like some unimaginable loser when you could be bounding from rooftop to rooftop like a bald badass dude with somewhere to be (probably a date with a hot lady...who you'll throw a car at! 'Cos that's how you roll!)? Knowing this, the developers tried to spice the driving up; streetraces litter the cities like discarded johnnies; purple rings float tantalisingly in the sky, normally in proximity to something ramp shaped, just begging to have a car propelled through them and cause Freud to get all excited and fidgety. Did these ring things convince me to convince myself I found the driving interesting? No sir, they did not.
But fuck it, and fuck the naysayers. Crackdown's all 'Hey, hey you! Are you saying nay?' 'Well, yes I am...' 'Well fuck you!' Crackdown knows what it's about, and it doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is, unlike some recent Bioware space RPG's. Naming no names. It's a game about finding orbs, normally by shooting someone in the head until orbs fall out. It's about climbing that skyscraper to see what the view's like. And it's got a sense of humour as it goes about it. Like a certain portal shooting extravaganza of brilliance of late (narrows it down), it understands the importance of a good narrator. Explode too many bus-loads of orphans and the narrator will remind you that civilians, whilst often an intolerable nuisance, are not there for you to slaughter. But you can tell he doesn't mean it. Granted, the narrator gets a bit repetitive a bit quick, but that just reminds you that you should be done playing this game by now and doing something else: 'go on, go play that Halo 3 beta you've been weeing yourself about' it taunts you. And you think 'oooh, maybe I should. I could do with brushing up on my Spartan Laser before tea-time'. You reach for the power button, but then it hits you, right in your long suffering balls: 'Won't somebody please think of the children?' 'Yes...' you say,'Yes. Think of all the children... who I haven't driven a rocket powered supercar over yet. Think of all the children I've yet to stick a limpet mine to, and then juggle in the air with my rocket launcher. Think of all the children that are sitting safely at home, having never been thrown off the top of a skyscraper...by me.' If not you, agent, then who? You sit back in your chair, briefly chastise yourself for your dereliction of duty by giving your balls one last, swift punch, and get back to work...
And so, like a trained worm leaping through tiny hoops for it's master (possibly hoops made out of Polo's), I provide the following two word summary of the above:
Buy it.
