Few games offer this kind of gratuitous power and free movement, because it would be overkill and generally implausible within a controlled narrative situation. This is where Crackdown's open nature shines. Players who enjoy following GTA's long and varied story campaigns are likely to be let down here, but those who derive enjoyment out of shirking the missions and going on wild rampages will find a deeper experience as a superhuman agent in Pacific City. Many of the truly memorable moments in the game will be the ones that were not planned, but the ones that arose out of the ability to tackle enemies or traverse the city in the way you saw fit at any given moment. The need to discover bosses on your own becomes a great feature, as it encourages exploration--and in Crackdown, exploration is significantly more exploratory than in most games, mainly due to agility granting so many more perspectives from which to view the city.

The game's powerful, superhero-esque flavor is well complimented by the colorful visual style, which utilizes frequent black outlining and high-contrast texture work to give a pulpy, low-color-comic-book aesthetic to the whole thing. It also helps in that it successfully joins the game's enormously violent and destructive happenings to its almost cartoonish and gleeful play style that evokes little of the real world ruthlessness implied by what's happening in-game. Somebody who walks into the room to find you trying to toss corpses as far as you can from the top of a skyscraper after recently having caused those corpses to become corpses with a series of rockets and head-kicks might be taken aback, but when you are playing this game you are not really thinking in those terms. Except when explicitly attempting to take out a gang boss, the game really is a sandbox, with all of the innocent attitudes of discovery that come along with it. Maybe you can get this car to the top of that building and blow it into the air with grenades, then use a rocket launcher to send it sailing across to another rooftop where it will crush a group of half a dozen gangsters. Why not?

That sense of style exuded by the visual design doesn't extend to the rest of the world design. There isn't much of the character and social observation that gives GTA its sharpness. There are flashes of that attitude, such as the billboard for a fictional nightclub named "Pumpers" plastered on the side of a church. Of course, that coexists alongside a very nonfictional in-game billboard campaign for Dodge. All in all, the city doesn't have all that much of a soul--but that's okay, since we're really just there to blow stuff up, and it handles that quite well.

Unfortunately, driving doesn't mesh the way the other four abilities do. For one thing, it is the only one that must be used completely independently; when in a car, you obviously benefit from none of your other skills. It can also be rather unwieldy to level up. There is driving skill to be earned with road races, which like the foot races have you pass through a series of checkpoints as quickly as possible, as well as for pulling off certain stunts--getting various amounts of air time or distance off of a jump, pulling off various types of flips, doing a barrel roll, and so on. You also gain driving points for running over gang members. This last bit is generally the most convenient, as there are almost always gang members in close proximity. However, as with the other killing-related actions, you'll hinder your progress by harming innocent civilians, meaning that attempting to gingerly roll over bad guys while avoiding good guys can sometimes feel like delicate surgery with a scalpel, which is rather at odds with the general sledgehammer approach the game tends to take otherwise.

This wouldn't be as much of a downside if driving were not so much less necessary to begin with than it is in most games of this type. In most cases, it is significantly more efficient and convenient to go from roof to roof to reach your destination than to acquire a car and navigate the city streets without inadvertently hitting any civilians or having your vehicle destroyed by rocket launcher-armed gangs. Even when having to travel to a different gang district, it is frequently easier to seek out the nearest supply point, which allows you to instantly travel to any other supply point you have previously visited.

That is not to say there aren't fun times to be had in cars. Throughout the world there are stunt markers positioned at high up points which, if driven through, will award numerous driving points. Many of the races are also well designed and fun, and trying to pull off tricks can be fun. In general, though, with the exception of some of the tricks from time to time, these are not things that can be enjoyed with the same spontaneity and integration that make the rest of the game's skills seem so much a crucial part of the experience.

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