Angry Robot

Crackdown Part III

Item 1, let me present: the car-kicking game. Hie thee to the highway; wait on the shoulder for cars to blast past, and try to kick them into the sea.

See, doesn’t that sound like fun? Trick is, if you come at them from the front, they will run you over. You have to come in from the side, and if they’re going at a reasonable highway speed you don’t have much of a window to successfully kick them into the sea. (Sea-kicking not required, but recommended.)

Item 2, the jumping truck. AKA the agency SUV with your driving skill maxed. On all of the vehicles, when you max your driving skill, the button that previously sounded the horn now triggers a new ability. The supercar fires machine guns, the truck cab nitro-boosts ahead, and the SUV fucking jumps. (It will also drive on walls and up buildings, something I haven’t played with enough yet).

Item 3, theme and setting. Once you have gotten to the end of the main storyline, it becomes evident that the game’s slightly offputting fascist-superman undercurrent is understood by the creators. And, well, it’s not really an under current at all. Like the GTA games, there is social criticism here behind the outrageous parody through exaggeration. This is not to say it has a classic story. Even if they are parodic, many of the lines in the boss intros & outros are clumsy and repetitive. But the developers clearly intended to do interesting things with the setting and story. They fell short, but at least they aimed high.

So even given the weak missions (which do get stronger on the third island BTW), there is a lot more depth in this game than was previously apparent. I’ve played it quite a bit now, and can imagining continuing to play it off and on for a while more.

And the jumping truck is quite literally my dream car.

Footnote: It must be hard to be a game reviewer. Look how long it took for me to make up my mind about this game. Sometimes it’s hard enough to firm up one’s ideas about a film after seeing it once, which takes only two hours. Some games can be played for hundreds. How do game critics do it? Is this part of the reason why there that problem about the lack of game journalism for adults?