Crackdown

[Anagnos]

Previously released on February 20, 2007 for the Xbox 360 console by Realtime Worlds along with the Halo 3 beta, this game has a special place in my heart. The plot of Crackdown is pretty simple: a dystopian metropolis is suffering from increase in crime rate and these criminal syndicates have taken control of its three main territories, and they are armed with military-grade weapons that make it difficult for law enforcement to combat them. This is the part where the player comes in association with a secret organization known as the Agency. Summarily, your objective is to eliminate the city's organized crime by yourself. Normally, you would likely consider this a pretty hard feat to accomplish, right? Except that you're no ordinary human, but a modified human being called the Agent.

As the game's name might suggest, this game is all about blowing stuff up and shooting your way through hordes of enemies while unlocking special abilities by collecting various orbs, which in this case are upgrades to make your character even stronger and harder to beat. But what really made this game for me was the amazing gameplay and by extension, the ending of the game, which turned out to be rather different than I'd initially believed. For a game that takes approximately few hours to complete, it's quite the impressive piece in the gaming industry.

Many have compared this game to Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row in the past, and while the game takes inspiration from these well-known and renowned titles, Crackdown did something completely different by having the player be a videogame version of Superman, in a sense. The third-person camera was very much needed for this game, for it is quite fast-paced and chaotic at times. The first Crackdown game offers not only singleplayer, but for more team-based players it has included cooperative gameplay up to two players. While I did not get to experience the multiplayer that much, I had fun times playing this game solo and I definitely recommend it for anyone that likes games like GTA or SR.

Unfortunately, since I haven't played any of the other titles, I can only give my thoughts about the original game. Appreciable fact is that this game series left a large impact on the open-world genre. I really liked the aspect of unlocking skills and becoming more powerful, and achieving a higher level of freedom as you become more powerful, and this game is one of the few that did this outstandingly.