It is nearly impossible to talk about Crackdown without comparing it in some capacity to the Grand Theft Auto franchise. This is unfortunate, because Crackdown is one of the first GTA clones that is not actually a GTA clone. Still, it clearly owes its existence to that now iconic series, taking GTA's revolutionary marriage of a large open urban sandbox with smart narrative and wit, and stripping out the latter elements while exaggerating the destruction-oriented gameplay elements that make the sandbox part of the equation so appealing. The game is the debut effort from Scotland-based Realtime Worlds, formed by original DMA Design (now Rockstar North) founder David Jones. Jones was instrumental in the creation of franchises such as Lemming as well as Grand Theft Auto itself, though he had left the company by the time the series reinvented itself with Grand Theft Auto III in 2001.

Crackdown, published by Microsoft as an Xbox 360 exclusive, thrusts you into an oppressive future society, in which three warring gangs have dominated Pacific City without much hindrance from an ineffective law enforcement bureau. Of course, it is up to you, a genetically enhanced superhuman judge-jury-and-executioner sort agent, to single-handedly clean up the streets. There are no missions in the traditional sense here. Your goal as an agent is to take out the 21 leaders of the city's three gangs. Each gang controls a fairly discrete section of the city, with bridges linking the three and an agency home base at the center of it all. Crackdown does not contain a defined linear narrative or set progression; you are simply deposited into a wide open city filled with skyscrapers, urban complexes, traffic, pedestrians, violent gangsters, law enforcement officers, and lots of explosive objects. Not even the bosses' locations are marked--when you come within a certain proximity of one while traversing the city, it is added to your map. It's a risky design decision, and if Crackdown were simply GTA minus missions, it would fall flat quickly.

Fortunately, it is not. You are aided in your goal of mobster eradication by five dynamic skills that grow more powerful as they are used: agility, driving, explosives, strength, and weapons. The existence of this skill system is what allows Crackdown's almost startlingly open structure to succeed, as throughout the game your character is able to achieve progressively more spectacular acts of destruction as well as extremely unhindered mobility. Explicitly destructive skills are advanced simply as you use them to take out your enemies. Shooting a gangster--or, for example, shooting a nearby explosive barrel or vehicle gas cap that causes a gangster to perish in the resultant explosion--will raise your weapons skill. Tossing a grenade at a gangster--or firing a rocket into a conveniently located armored car that then flies into and crushes several gangsters--will raise your explosives skill, accompanied by gorgeous tendrilled explosions. Throwing a gangster off a cliff--or throwing a car on top of him--will raise your strength skill.

In each of these areas you start off at a fairly typical video gamey level of ability; that is, you're already better at each than the grunts you'll encounter. You can pick up bad guys and crates and toss them around, and fill a guy full of lead with more speed and accuracy than they can you. As you use them more and more, however, you'll surpass that video game level and begin to reach levels verging on superheroism. By the time your skills are brought to their maximum potential, buses can be thrown with ease and you can sustain enormous amounts of damage before reincarnating back at home base or any of the rejuvenating supply points scattered around the city. Grenades and rockets gain a comically wide and powerful blast radius, and once the homing "Firefly" rocket launcher and multiple-charge cluster grenades are acquired you essentially become a walking tank. Guns, which use a lock-on aiming system that increases accuracy the longer one is locked onto a given target, eventually reach their maximum accuracy with deadly quickness. Just as taking out gangsters boosts these stats, so does shooting, blowing up, or maiming innocent bystanders detract from your experience in a skill, which serves to rein in the overall mayhem--that is, until your skills are maxed and losing skill progress becomes impossible.

Despite being broken up into numbered levels as in many RPGs, the skill system has an organic feel to it. Unlike most level-based RPGs, most skills evolve naturally in proportion to their use, but on the other hand, unlike many dynamically leveling RPGs, it is easy to get a fairly precise handle on the speed of your progression in a given area. In the end, it doesn't end up feeling anything like an RPG at all. Crackdown is absolutely an action game, one that allows you to ratchet up the action exponentially based on the effort put into it, outside of a linear scheme.

The effectiveness of these abilities would be greatly diminished, perhaps cripplingly so, without Crackdown's ace in the hole: the agility skill. Agility is what determines the potential length and height of your superhuman leaps, which directly correlates to your mobility in the urban jungle of the game world. Even from the start of the game, you are able to jump nearly two times your own height, but that seems almost painfully weak after experiencing what the game is like at maximum agility, which allows incredibly fast running paired with thirty foot high leaps across vast distances--and when you land, the ground visibly cracks. Thanks to the ability of your character to grab onto handholds and launch upwards to grab the next one, this increased jumping ability makes scaling sheer surfaces easier and easier. Leveling up agility is a more conscious process than leveling up the prior three. Scattered all around high altitude points throughout the city are 500 agility orbs, which can be collected to boost the stat. In many cases, the designers have arranged Tony Hawk-like "lines," allowing smooth rooftop dashes to pick up strings of orbs. For greater agility boosts, you can complete timed foot races, which have you run over and around buildings to pass through checkpoints along a frequently high altitude route. Each of these races even has its own online time leaderboard.

Crucially, jumping is hardly any kind of limiting factor when dealing out destruction. While sailing through the air, you can still lock on to and shoot enemies, toss aimed grenades, reload, and throw things basically just as easily as when on the ground, meaning you can be in motion a great deal of the time. Crackdown makes very few concessions of any kind towards reality, and the ability to conduct all of your job-related duties (you know, blowing stuff up) with full effectiveness while jumping is largely what gives the game its superheroic quality. Rather than feeling simply like the aforementioned heavily armed tank, you become a nimble jumping heavily armed tank, whatever that is. It is immensely satisfying to take a running jump over a barrier while locked on to and firing rounds into an enemy, then plant a satisfying kick into his face to finish him off.

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