Crackdown -- The Sandbox, Plus One.

Well, I'm sure of it, Crackdown is greatness. But why? It's just a sandbox game. It's just another Grand Theft Auto clone, isn't it? It is another sandbox game. You get to run and gun and drive your way through another living city. You get to shoot people and run them over and generally cause all sorts of mayhem. You get to search every nook and cranny for hidden items. Just like Saints Row before it, Crackdown takes the basic GTA formula and improves on the mechanics. It features combat control with better aiming and better overall vehicle and character control. And just like Saint's Row it features the Havok physics engine so bodies bounce and the unexpected tends to happen quite often. And unlike Saints Row before it Crackdown wisely ditches the story element of GTA. Crackdown's story is minimal. You'll get some background information on each of the three gangs and the twenty-one bosses within the game. When you get close enough to a boss, you'll get their history in a brief dossier scene. So essentially you're looking at a GTA clone with improved mechanics and a minimal at best story? Realtime Worlds did bring a couple of things of their own to the table. It's in these couple innovations that Crackdown's brilliance shines through in my opinion. In the game you're playing a genetically enhanced supercop. You're able to level your skills in five distinct areas. They are agility, driving, explosives, strength, and weapons. As you use each of the skills or find hidden items that boost skills you're steadily increasing their levels.  Increase a specific skill by one-hundred and you'll level the skill. Each skill can be leveled four times. At level one in strength for example you can lift objects up to a certain weight and throw them for a set distance. In other words you can pick up a trash can and throw it thirty feet down the street. By strength level four you can lift a bus and throw it over buildings. At agility level four you'll be leaping and bounding from the rooftops like the Incredible Hulk. The sense of power and progression is great. You'll want to level your skill levels. And you'll enjoy doing it. The biggest innovation is really a simple one. Sure, the game has you creating havoc in the streets with the Havok engine and everything is just totally unpredictable. Realtime Worlds has enabled online co-op with the sandbox. Just adding in one more living player to the living city adds an amazing amount of unpredictability to the mix. And this is the real deal co-op. This isn't special closed off missions like in Saints Row. Someone can come into your game whenever. This enables me to be in a car race within the game and have Magus come out of nowhere in his own car and cause a head-on collision, and I still manage to complete the race. This enables me to be minding my own business attempting to level my weapons skill rating by shooting some gang members only to be shot in the back by a rocket I never saw coming followed up by Riddel's giggling. Just because she's mean like that. The online co-op of Crackdown is brilliantly fun in an arcade like way. It's old style co-op run and gun fun brought to the sandbox. We've all essentially been playing the same way. We've been leveling our skills and completing the races and trying for achievements and just generally having a blast messing around without killing the bosses and advancing toward what would be the game's end.  It's a game where you'll set out to do something specific and just get instantly distracted and distracted again and you'll have long forgotten what you were supposed to be doing. And it doesn't even matter, because it's just so much fun.