I’ve only recently had the pleasure of experiencing the intricacies of Crackdown. It’s extremely easy to just fob this off as a GTA-clone, but even though the formula is the same for both, they’re actually quite unique.

The latter part of the GTA series was paced. You had downtimes of driving between cities, delivering packages, and flying planes, as well as shooting mafioso and hood rivals, and generally acting like a social menace when you were bored. You could cruise the streets or you could ride a motorbike against traffic. It felt calm and controlled compared to Crackdown.

On the other hand, Crackdown is constant adrenaline. From the minute you drive out of your HQ, you’re propelled into the air over the unsuspecting heads of a local gang. After you play for a while and build up some skills, you’ll eventually encounter a pack of gang members and you’ll find that you’re quickly targetting each one with ease, lobbing grenades to make them scatter, shooting out kneecaps before delivering a friendly curb stomp, and lifting trucks over your head to throw in their general direction. And when you’re done, you’ll leap 25 feet in the air onto the nearest rooftop to continue on to your next objective. It has the soul of deathmatch and combines it with the freeform style of GTA. Gang member taking cover behind a car? That’s okay, just kick the car into them.

While GTA has a core storyline that you play out, Crackdown doesn’t even try to formulate a story. It simply states that the city has succumbed to gangs, and it’s up to you to clean up the streets in the only way an augmented superhuman can - with brute force, a cache of munitions and a positive shitload of explosives.

No doubt, there are some niggles about this game that do peeve me off, like the turning circle of the cars that really puts me off driving. You can’t swing them around wildly like in GTA or in Halo 3. Realistic? Mmm…

But it’s good. Surprisingly good. So good that I must have played about 4-5 hours straight of it last night, and got back into it this morning.

And then I remembered I had work to do.

I was meant to go to atomic live today…oh well

Just a heads up on some new content coming in, courtesy of the kind folk at Codemasters - I’ll be giving a first-hand account and review of my romp through the unholy city of Al-Khali in Clive Barker’s Jericho. Yeah, this one might freak me out almost as much as Project Zero did, but in a completely different way. And it has guns. And swords.

From Codemasters:

"Jericho is a supernatural horror-themed FPS game for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC platforms developed by Codemasters, with horror author Clive Barker providing the premise for the game. In this squad-based first-person shooter, you’ll be tasked with destroying an ancient evil that’s threatening the world in multiple time zones."

Based on reading some initial reviews for PC, it looks a bit tenuous at first. PC Powerplay delivered a pretty ordinary score, as did PC Zone UK. But I’d love to prove them wrong. I’d love to see an author’s ideas translated into something I can interact with and have it executed with style and grace. Homeworld was a step in the right direction in this regard - it had one of the simplest yet most engrossing stories I have come across. It was like Lemmings with the depth and drama of a space opera.

Anyways, to get back on track - Clive obviously thinks he’s on a good thing, because he’s already thinking about making plans for a sequel. Lets hope it can be built upon a solid introductory title.

Stay tuned.