Crackdown 2
Ruffian Games
Rating: 
Crackdown 2 pitches the gamer straight into the midst of a dystopian nightmare. In a future that resembles the military-industrial complex taken to diabolical extremes, you play an anonymous armour-suited ‘Agent’ working for a heavy-handed government fighting to keep control of a collapsing society.
“This city is infected…You are the Cure” comes the tagline, and it’s your job to neutralise the baying hordes of Freaks (yep, you guessed it, mutants from some bio-disaster) and Cell terrorists (who drive around in Mad Max style trucks blaring drum & bass music), both of whom are hell-bent on tearing Pacific City asunder. It’s 28 Days Later meets 1984 and it’s a lot of fun.
Ruffian has crafted a grabbable, ‘sticky’ environment where no obstacle seems insurmountable. Most impressive is the way your abilities increase the more you interact with the environment, turning you from a puny bloke barely able to lift a body into a Neo-meets-Robocop big bad mean mother capable of picking up huge trucks and launching them over the horizon.
Crackdown 2 is a game with a knowing sense of humour which complements its comic-book style. The all-seeing ‘Voice Of The Agency’ provides commentary on your actions and gives you positive feedback if you do something clever such as rip a car door off and use it as a shield (“Yeah! Shake that thing!”). Meanwhile, vault over the rooftops and go steaming up to a terrorist with your death mask on, only for him to have the nonchalance to utter the most casual “Hey, how you doing?” before you obliterate him with a huge chunk of masonry. It would have been so easy to make all these soundbites stiff and serious.
Like its predecessor, some of the best times in Crackdown 2 are had up in the skies hopping across rooftops like an airborne Gollum in pursuit of neon-green agility orbs, a pleasant pursuit far removed from the carnage raging on the streets below (unless you underestimate that jump). Although the sand-box freedom leaves the gamer free to jump into the game at any point and pursue any goal, all these goals are all rather limited.
Cash-pressed fans may be loth to shell out on a sequel that fails to take any major leaps. Nevertheless, Crackdown 2 is an immensely rewarding game. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of having just slaughtered a stronghold, emerging and leaping like a Nietzchean superman into the city sky as the dawn breaks.
