Punk Agent
What fascinates me about Crackdown 2 (2010, Ruffian / Microsoft, 360) is that it is absolutely unapologetic about what it is. It is mainstream gaming’s anti-hero, the two-fingered salute to the rest of the industry. It may end up the place core gamers go to die 
.
Many of the reviews that I’ve read of the game concentrate on the lack of story, the familiarity of the city, the lack of graphical detail, the lack of genuine new features, the game’s slavish similarity to the first game. But what the reviews fail to appreciate, in my opinion, is that these so-called weaknesses are absolutely intentional. You are criticising a game for being exactly what it always wanted to be – isn’t that somehow missing the point?
I don’t think the purpose of a review is to complain about what a game doesn’t have, as if ticking boxes on a checklist – what is Crackdown 2 and why does it confound these criticisms? In my opinion, the design decisions made for Crackdown 2 are some of the bravest I’ve seen from a major release this year. They will doubtless restrict sales, and put off certain customers, but they service one of the purer gameplay experiences around. Which, after all, was the whole point of Crackdown in the first place.
The game actually has even less story than the original game, if that were possible – this immediately puts off a whole section of the gaming public. And at first this feels regressive – after a brief tutorial one is simply poured out onto the streets and invited to jump around shooting stuff and setting off a bunch of simple mini-missions to progress. The original Crackdown had a bunch of criminal bosses to track down like story missions, usually defended by scores of gunmen to dispatch. This game simply gets rid of the bosses, and puts all the gunmen out in the open.
By which it becomes less pretentious, and simply is what it is. No cut-scenes, little dialogue, just pure action. I find that refreshing, and I think it was a great decision. Like Borderlands or Left 4 Dead, this is simply a playground for you to create your own stories, and is a much purer gaming experience for it. A clever and brave move.
One gigantic decision with this sequel is to simply reproduce the same city from the first game. At first one cannot see the positives in this decision. But I think it works. There are no new major surprises in terms of discovering new bits of the landscape, but that is not what Crackdown is essentially about anyway. All one needs is a framework for gameplay. After all we don’t alter the chessboard for each new game of chess. Crackdown is all about making you as familiar as possible with your surroundings, then enabling fun gameplay in those surroundings. In the end, I think the decision to replay the same city is both clever and brave. Again!
Crackdown became synonymous with its orbs – the collectibles that litter the city. It’s a poster-boy for criticism of the so-called narrative dissonance of having to collect lots of things for an achievement. So what does Crackdown 2 do? It adds new orbs. More collectibles, including online-only ones. They become as synonymous with the city as the buildings and streets themselves – there’s no need to question their logic, because this is a game where only game logic applies anyway.
When you get an achievement in Crackdown 2, the American announcer that narrates the action announces it in loud terms, and congratulates you. It might be game-breaking in some worlds, but here it is fitting. This is a game that has no problem with immersion-breaking, because it is secure in what it is. There is no character to dispell, because you know you are a super-powered agent and that is it as far as the characterisation goes – the rest is all you, the player. There is no narrative to break, because the narrative is in playing the game in this cityscape playground.
And Crackdown 2 has simply some of the best online co-op in gaming. It’s completely stress-free – you can seek out players or just allow them to turn up in your city. You can join a city and help someone with their missions, or just dick around to your heart’s content. This is what the game was built to do. There is simply no stress involved – there is no aim for a griefer to spoil, no directive to follow or react against, one is simply in a gamespace expressing oneself. One can join a game and be on the opposite side of the city to the host and ignore them for an hour. No biggie.
So what do you do? You play, until you’ve had enough, then you switch off the game. You run and jump with ever-increasing prowess to reach new agility orbs. You fight and shoot with ever-increasing strength and accuracy. You drive with ever increasing speed. Your presence isn’t of value in terms of where in a story you are, or what items you have, or how much money you have made, but in what you can actually physically do with your virtual character. Your score is your body. It’s the purest embodiment of achievement in a game I can think of.
And it is anarchy, because it confounds many of the principles of game design. How can you design for verticality when a super-agent can circumvent it? How can you design for difficulty when a protagonist can simply outgrow it? So what Crackdown does is simply throw away the keys and unlock everything – an open space of a city, and an out-of-control player within it.
After all this, I look at Crackdown 2, and I salute how much it salutes and respects Crackdown’s spirit. It IS Crackdown, which is all it ever should be. I think it adds to Crackdown’s legacy – fuck the slings and arrows of modern gaming philosophies, this is a plaything for players to play. I think we will look back at Crackdown and its sequel as absolutely key titles of the last decade purely for that reason. They know exactly what they are, and are slices of perfection on those terms.
It makes me look at my list from this year – games of real ambition and with incredible production values (Heavy Rain, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect 2, Bayonetta) that this game cannot really match. But yet this is the game I would take to the desert island to play with, and isn’t that what gaming is supposed to be about?
