Ponder the orb. All around in Crackdown 2, as in the original game, there are agility orbs which permanently boost your powers when collected. Collect them and you can jump that bit higher and further, making it easy to reach more of them, hunting down increasingly obscured and difficult-to-reach parts of its map. Crackdown offered plenty of other third-person open world battling and things to do, but the orbs stood out.
Progression systems tied into exploration were nothing new to games (Batman did it, in 3D, in 1986), but something about the combination of simplicity and the sheer scale and verticality of Crackdown and its orbs was new. Especially in early 2007. With a further boost from being bundled with Halo 3 beta test access, Crackdown went on to sell well enough over time that its sequel being a success was no surprise.
I didn’t play Crackdown, so Crackdown 2 was my first experience with its systems. Luckily, one of the main complaints levied against it was that it was too similar, the same things in the same place, so I feel like I have been given a fair taste there. I could completely get the big appeal of orb-hunting, of trying out jumps and finding that this time you can jump just far enough, of developing superheroic capabilities, step by step.
That the freedom comes packaged with a certain clumsiness was perhaps more apparent by its repetition in 2010, and even more so in 2023. Those jumps are weightless in a way which doesn’t always feel super-powered so much as just a bit loose. The blocky construction of the city helps make it a playground, but also makes it easier to read as just that alone. Combat comes with the same kind of sense of lightness, everything swimming through a layer of invisible treacle. Other games like Assassin’s Creed and Mirror’s Edge had already taken the original Crackdown’s ideas and run with them, leaving it behind. That’s not why I disliked my time with Crackdown 2 so much, though. Fun mechanics rendered a bit outdated aren’t a huge problem, at least not next to what passes for Crackdown 2’s narrative.
You play a biologically-enhanced agent tasked with cleaning up the city from revolutionaries and mutants, directed by voiced instructions from the Agency’s unseen director. Voiced by Michael McConnohie, it is a performance which conveys monumental smugness and nastiness. “I don’t trust you to wipe your own ass yet” he tells you early on, while constantly referring to “freaks” in a way that makes clear they’re below contempt. He makes condescending comments on your every move.
The extremities of the world view in Crackdown 2 are clearly meant as satire. It was produced by a developer broken off from the original game’s developers, Realtime Worlds, who were Scottish and led by David Jones, previously of Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto fame. The Grand Theft Auto series is a pretty obvious reference point, both for its fictionalised American open world setting and the freedom to blow things up all around it. Crackdown is a different kind of satirical vision of America writ large, with a bit of Judge Dredd layered in. At one point as I wandered the rooftops I heard a radio playing the sound of R.E.M.’s anti-Reagan rant “Ignoreland”, which seems to point towards where the game is meant to come from.
The thing is, satirising extremist attitudes in this case means being subjected to those attitudes constantly, a drip-feed of unpleasant fascism that doesn’t even have the benefit of being particularly inventive or funny. The set-up immediately put me in mind of ’90s FMV future shock racer MegaRace. For all that game’s flaws, its equivalent director Lance Boyle was many times more compelling as a performance of an amoral dystopia.
The closest I got to enjoying the Crackdown 2 version was when it punished me for killing too many civilians after a lecture that this should be a learning experience, and that it would hurt the Agency as much as it would hurt me. The inadequacy of the gameplay response was clearly meant to be the point, but it didn’t feel very cutting in context. Maybe because it was treated as being on the same level of seriousness as the practice of getting achievements, with each instance accompanied by the director saying “that’s an achievement” in pompous deflation.
Even more than MegaRace, what Crackdown 2’s voiceover reminded me of was a contemporary set of memorably hateful Barclays adverts. They had typical thoughtless banking advert visual metaphors play out, while a voiceover from Stephen Merchant commented that this was, in fact, what was happening. As if just pointing out that what you were doing was lazy shit was some inoculation against criticism for turning out the laziest possible shit. There is way of making this kind of meta-humour work — improbably, I will actually get to talk on this blog about a positive example also featuring Stephen Merchant — but Crackdown 2 really isn’t it.
Top of the charts for week ending 10 July 2010:
Top of the charts for week ending 17 July 2010:
