Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

The idea for a sequel for Crackdown was pretty much a no brainer.  The first title sold a couple of million copies; help with the packaged in Halo 3 beta codes.  However, once people actually took Crackdown for a spin, it surprised with its fun collectibles and easy to manage co-op play.  Crackdown 2 looks to recapture the feeling of the first tile, while improving on the main story.  Unfortunately, Crackdown 2 seems to have taken a step backwards, with subpar shooting mechanics, dull and uninteresting city design and all around boring gameplay.

Crackdown 2 starts about ten years after the first game.  You start off the game as a new agent, coming straight out of the growing process, as a new threat has fallen upon Pacific City.  It seems that genetic experiments have created a race of people called Freaks, and they terrorize the neighborhoods at night.  But if that was not enough, you also have a terrorist group called Cell that has taken over huge swaths of territory in Paradise City.  As an agent, you need to take care of both of these items, and that is about it for story.  Yeah, Crackdown 2 is about as meaty on story as the first title.  The whole point is to get you into the world and having fun.

That sense of fun lasts about two minutes.  Your first mission has you taking back a control point from Cell.  Sounds easy enough until you realize that the targeting system rarely targets what you want to hit.  In this case, the game would target cars as well as people, and nine times out of ten, it would target the cars instead of the enemies getting out of them.  Sure, a car explosion could take out these people, but not with the entry level weapons.  Worse still is that the targeting system will also target agent vehicles and civilian vehicles, making for some unwanted casualties and enemies.  Worse still is that the weapons always seem underpowered.  Even some of the heavy stuff later on seems weak in nature.  Sure the explosive weapons work well, but you get those far later in the game to be of any use.  And again, they do so much collateral damage that you end up taking out lots of civilians.

Your skills in Crackdown 2 are again rewarded by collecting orbs and doing specific tasks.  For example, my melee combat skills were improved the more I used them.  My jumping and agility were boosted as I used them, and collected agility orbs.  New to the game are renegade orbs.  These orbs move around the environment and require you to be on foot or in a car to chase the specific orbs and they will boost your skills more so than a normal orb.  However, chasing these orbs is not that fun, and at sometimes just becomes tedious.  Also, the bonus is not as big enough to warrant the energy needed to catch these things. I did enjoy collecting the normal orbs quite a bit, and that was the big catch of the first title.  Now you have these orbs, audio recordings, renegade orbs and more to collect.

You would think that the Freaks that were added would be the main point of Crackdown 2, and to some degree they are, but overall, the just seem so throwaway to the story.   You could have left the Freaks out entirely and you would not have missed much in the grand scheme of things.  They are just there to be another menace to kill when it gets dark.  They are stupid, numerous, and basically cannon fodder to help boost your melee or gun skills.  I often wondered as I played Crackdown 2, if the whole point of the Freaks was to extend the life of the game, and for boosting your melee and gun skills.

New to Crackdown 2 is full four person co-op play through the main missions, and towards the end of it, you are going to need the assist.  As a single player, I found some of the Cell strongholds to be hard too difficult to manage on my own.  Normally, I found myself running out of ammo far before the mission ended, leaving me to pick up less powerful weapons from the enemies.  Having a couple of more people with you to take these points down seemed far easier, and showed the lack of play balancing by the developers.  One person will be overwhelmed, while several will walk through without a challenge.

Visually Crackdown 2 seems to have taken a step back, with people losing a lot of visual fidelity.  I did find that the cars seemed to have more details than the first title, but overall, the game looks dated.  Not sure if it was due to Ruffian using a new engine, or not knowing how to work well with the first engine, but the game looks average at best to me.  There is a lot of repetition to the city and the enemies, and if anything, there are no real distinguishing landmarks that stand out like there were in the first Crackdown.

As stated before, the drop in/drop out co-op works as advertised in Crackdown 2, and rolling around with a posse of friends in Pacific City is highly entertaining.  It takes out some of the more difficult challenges, while giving you a fun time with friends.  Multiplayer is also a nice addition, but something that I think will be overlooked in the grand scheme of things.  Agents have a lot of range, which can bring new meanings to Death from Above in the multiplayer, but I stuck mostly with the co-op, finding it far more enjoyable than chasing down an agent in multiplayer.

The biggest hurdle for Crackdown 2 was put in place by the new developer Ruffian Games, and that was the idea to stick with the first game’s design and ship out a sequel.  They never looked to add innovation to Crackdown 2 at any point.  If anything they have taken more away than added, as Crackdown offered you bonuses for taking enemy mob bosses out of the picture.  They might lose some recruiting options, or maybe they would be slower to re-arm, but Crackdown 2 gives you none of that.  Defeating Freaks from areas of the maps, just means they will swarm there large numbers into smaller areas.  The same goes for defeating Cell strongholds.  You beat one, but it gives you no discernable bonus for doing so, leaving you with little motivation to proceed to the next hurdle.

At the end of the day, Crackdown 2 is more of the first Crackdown, but in worse packaging.  Gone are the objective based reward system and in are overwhelming numbers and poor targeting mechanisms.  Mix in an even more generic storyline and you have an exercise in futility.  The co-op and orb collection becomes the title’s saving grace, but when that is the secondary nature of Crackdown 2, what does that say towards the rest of the game design.  Crackdown 2 starts off fun enough, but drags itself over the finish line.  Crackdown 2 gets 2.5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.
Check out Crackdown 2 and other Xbox 360  reviews at Test Freaks.