Microsoft Xbox 360 - Look Into 'Crackdown 2'

Microsoft’s X10 event tonight has some notable titles on display, and while Tom said the most exciting from his standpoint was Halo: Reach. However, the one that I was excited about seeing was Crackdown 2. The sequel to the 2007 game that earned two TeamXbox Game of the Year awards for that year (Best Action Game of the Year and Sleeper Hit of the Year) is highly anticipated, and gamers are interested in what developer Ruffian Games is doing to build on the original.

The first thing I can say is that Crackdown 2 looks ready to offer consistent, high-intensity combat as its predecessor did. Our demo showed numerous battles, with the controllable character leaping and firing wildly around parking lots, streets, buildings and more. We expect a similarly large cache of armaments and explosives—during our viewing , we saw various guns, rocket launchers, grenades and, of course, the requisite red, exploding barrels (which have a hazard indicator easily spotted from a distance).

However, there’s an interesting twist to Crackdown 2’s combat in that the day/night cycle will change what you face in the world. During the day, there’s a scattering of enemies that’ll keep you busy, but when the sun sets, it’s literally time for the Freaks to come out. The facilities you destroyed in the first game end up being responsible for a large number of citizens being turned into Freaks—and hundreds of them at that. The demoist hopped in a car and plowed through oodles of the mindless zombies as they ambled through the city, with “oodles” referring to streets that are packed curb-to-curb with the wandering hazardous wasted.
 

As you’d expect, the orb system—which proved to be one of the most popular elements in the debut title—returns in Crackdown 2. Much of it seems to be similar to the first game, with kills being rewarded by a spray of orbs that add to your level-up meters agility, gunplay, melee, explosive use and driving. And there’ll still be many, many Agility Orbs for you to pick up from rooftops, ledges hidey-holes throughout the city. Ruffian noted that there’ll be a wild addition in the form of Renegade Orbs, which look and act similar with the twist that they’ll run away from you if you get too close. We didn’t see any in practice, so we don’t know how hard they are to corral, but we’re pretty sure they’ll add to the game’s frantic pace in a different way.

Getting back to discussion of the game’s vehicles, Crackdown 2’s selection is apparently getting an increase, so you’ll have more rides to choose from when you need to get from point to point faster. One of these is an armor-plated helicopter, spacious enough to hold you and four of your friends, as well as to carry plenty of rockets for you to wreak havoc throughout the city.

And that brings us to the mention of four-player co-op gameplay, which Ruffian promises will rock the Xbox 360 community. Our demo only showed two players and had them leaping out of a helicopter at the same time and plummeting to the ground, not to their characters’ demise, but, thanks to a forced increase of gravity, which has your impact causing a highly damaging shockwave to those enemies around you.

I only asked one question: Will there be a Crackdown 2 demo for download from Xbox Live Marketplace? The good news is, yes, there’ll be a playable demo closer to the game’s launch (with Ruffian saying it’ll have similar features to the original Crackdown in that it’ll offer accelerated leveling-up, so you can try out the game in a somewhat compressed manner). Unfortunately, the bad news is that we don’t know when that game launch will be, except that it’ll come before the end of 2010. As the wise Tom Petty warbled, “The waitin’ is the hardest part…”

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