Five Favorite Open Worlds #3: Crackdown

Super powers and open world gameplay seemed to go hand in hand as the immense gamespaces scream out for over the top action. Many of the best open world games are all about letting you go wild. Crackdown was one of the few original licenses that gave players the freedom to go crazy without needing a super hero property and it delivered one of the best examples of collectibles in any game.

Secret Agent Man:

The story of Crackdown was that Pacific City was so overrun with crime and corruption that they needed to turn to the mysterious Agency to take control back. The Agency tasks the player who is a genetically modified agent to go out and take down each criminal organization by going after the major players.

The first thing that set Crackdown apart from other open world games then and to this day was how the game flow was set up. Each area of the city was controlled by a different group and once in an area you were free to do whatever you wanted.

The overall goal was to take down the leader of the group who was always located in a major faculty. The other members of the group provided some benefit when you were fighting any members such as better guns, faster cars or well trained henchmen.

By killing the lieutenants you would weaken the group as a whole making it easier to take out the next person and so on. In this regard, Crackdown was linear in the fact that you had goals to achieve, but you were free to do whatever you wanted in whatever order.

What made Crackdown so compelling was the skill progression system. By completing side quests killing guards and the mentioned collectible hunt (which we’ll go into detail about soon), your agent would earn experience. The experience was tied to different categories: shooting, agility, explosives, strength and driving I believe.

When you earned enough experience, your character would level up and their respective abilities with each trait would improve. More agility meant that you could run faster and jump higher or strength allowing you to punch harder. The beauty of Crackdown’s progression was that you improved in the ways that you played the game.

For example: Focusing on driving and shooting would eventually let you drive modified cars and shoot far more accurately. You were of course free to go up every skill tree but it was great in how the game rewarded you for doing what you wanted.

All across the city were bonus missions that challenged the player further with medals and experience as rewards. For the completetist out there, you had a lot to achieve.

But where Crackdown really succeeded was its collectible hunt and how to this day I haven’t seen a game yet that made a more compelling side activity.

Hum and Seek:

The collectible in Crackdown were agility orbs. These green orbs were hidden all across the city at different heights and different degrees of difficulty. For every orb you picked up, your natural jumping height would improve slightly and you would earn agility experience. Naturally, when you leveled up in agility you would receive a bigger boost to jump height along with the running speed bonus.

The agility orbs were an excellent example of a collectible that engages the player to hunt them down.

There are several factors that made hunting agility orbs so compelling. First was the instant reward of getting them, unlike in the GTA games where you had collect a certain number before getting rewarded.

Here, every orb provided the player with a benefit.

Second was how the developers teased the player into going after them. It was hard not to notice the orbs up on some pole or on the side of a building just begging you to stop what you were doing and go after them. The humming the orbs made provided a secondary way of detecting them and allowed you to hunt them without having to stay glued to a map system.

Despite the great progression and collectible system, Crackdown wasn’t perfect. The basic gameplay was somewhat generic with each criminal not really putting up a fight, you weren’t fighting any other enhanced people for example.

The moment to moment gameplay was great but the whole driving system became obsolete the further you played and the higher you raised your agility stat. By the time you reach the second area, you should be able to disregard driving all together with exception for the driving related side missions.

Crackdown was one of those games that could have really gone places with a sequel to capitalize on what made the game work, like the jump from Assassin’s Creed 1 to 2. However, Crackdown’s sequel was handed to another development team as the original designers: Realtime Worlds had already moved on to another project.

Instead we got a sequel that mishandled the collectible system, by turning them into an exercise in frustration and a simplified mission structure. And it looks like for right now, we’ve seen the last of Crackdown.

As we move into the final two games on my list, these titles are actually older than the games mentioned so far, but still managed to deliver.

Up Next: Hulk Smash

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