This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.
Crackdown 2 just didn’t hit. It was a pretty same-y sequel that didn’t bring a lot of appealing new stuff to the table, aside from four-player co-op. And Crackdown 3? Well, the development of that one might be more interesting than the final game itself turned out to be. Remember when the Xbox’s Azure servers in the cloud were going to power a fully destructible world? The power of countless Xbox Ones, all working together – gaming’s first data center (I’m only half-joking)! The promise of what Crackdown 3 said it was going to do versus what it finally delivered in the end was, well…let’s just say there was a Grand Canyon-sized gap that not even a fully powered-up Crackdown Agent could leap across.
But the original Crackdown? That one, funny enough, was almost the opposite. No one necessarily expected much from it at all (though in hindsight, we probably should have, given who was overseeing it – more on that in a moment). It was discounted as The Thing You Had to Buy to Get the Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta. It’s true; the PS2 had Zone of the Enders as its Metal Gear Solid 2 delivery system, and the Xbox 360 used a new IP of its own to bring Crackdown to the masses in an age just before digital delivery really took over for these kinds of things.
It turned out to be a really terrific comic-book power fantasy brought to life. Or, put another way, a game very worthy of any Xbox 360 owner’s attention, regardless of the fact that it was a surrogate for the public’s first taste of Halo 3. Set in Pacific City, three gangs had taken over different areas of town, and it was up to you as a fledgling Agent to stop them. You’d get better at running, shooting, and driving by doing those activities. Kill an enemy with a gun and a pile of gun skill orbs would explode out of him. Same with agility (jumping), strength (melee attacks), explosives (using grenades or rocket launchers), and driving. Eventually you could almost literally leap tall buildings in a single bound. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Crackdown has one of the most satisfying power progressions in a game that I’ve ever played (I’d also put the underappreciated original-Xbox cult classic Breakdown in this group too). In the beginning of the game you can run a bit, shoot a bit, punch a bit, drive a bit, and jump a bit. By the end, if you’d put all the work in at the gym known as the entirety of Pacific City, you were a fully fledged superhero.
Extra cool at the time was that Crackdown didn’t put any guardrails on where you could and couldn’t go. The leaders of the city’s gangs were waiting for you in their strongholds. Sure, they were heavily guarded by minions and underlings, but if you could figure out a way through and kill the gang leader in the first hour or two of the game, then more power to you!
Crackdown also has, to this day, some of my all-time favorite Xbox Achievements. The most memorable of these were tied together: there was the “High Flyer” Achievement for climbing your way to the very top of Agency Tower, the tallest building in the city. And then, if you successfully jumped off and splashed down in the adjacent bay without faceplanting into the pavement immediately surrounding the Tower, you’d get the “Base Jumper” Achievement.
As I mentioned before, Crackdown being a sneaky-great open-world superhero power fantasy shouldn’t have been a surprise, as it was directed by David Jones, aka the Original Creator of Grand Theft Auto. While Jones hadn’t worked on Rockstar’s megafranchise in quite some time, he nevertheless helped get it off the ground, and thus clearly knew a thing or two about building a great sandbox.
It’s a bummer that Microsoft could never quite recapture the magic of the original Crackdown, and in all likelihood the series is probably done for good, what with Asha Sharma’s franchise-first focus for the company moving forward, but Crackdown was a highlight in an Xbox 360 era full of highlights, and it deserves to be remembered for being more than just a necessary purchase to get your hands on the Halo 3 multiplayer beta.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
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