chrominance
Member
I've been trying to clean up my 360 backlog this year, mainly in anticipation of my 60GB 360 eventually kicking the bucket one day (though between Xbox One backwards compatibility and the continued existence of 360s on store shelves, this has become less urgent). Of course, having bought my 360 only about halfway through the generation, there are a bunch of launch titles (or close to) that I missed out on, but have picked up in sales or whatnot. That's how I got myself a copy of Crackdown 2, which I later learned wasn't as good as the first one. So I picked that up in an XBLA sale as well.
Some games age better than others. Crackdown suffers particularly badly in this department. I know Crackdown was well received, so I'm trying to give it the benefit of the doubt, but it's really hard not to think that everything it does has been better achieved by later games. Getting around the world is incredibly painful, for example. Minor innovations introduced in franchises like Infamous or Assassin's Creed have greatly improved the basic act of climbing the side of a building. Crackdown feels like an early prototype of those same systems.
There aren't enough handholds on building walls, especially in places where you'd think there would be one. You're constantly running into small overhangs when trying to climb a building, and there's precious little you can do to climb past one. Even basic things like trying to climb a series of balconies can often fail because you might fly just slightly too far away from a balcony and then suddenly be unable to grab a ledge, causing you to fall to the ground (and sometimes your death). This happens even when you're not providing any input on the left stick, which you'd think would just mean "jump straight up and catch the next ledge." Which it does, about 60% of the time.
Aiming is kind of a pain, seemingly taking a page from Grand Theft Auto 3's lock-on aiming system (or at least I think it is, I played the vast majority of the GTA3 trilogy on PC). When it works, it's fine, though obviously arcade-like in execution. But all too often, it'll lock onto a far away target when you're getting punched by three dudes, or it'll lock onto a car instead of the driver that just got out, or you'll lock onto a person you just killed instead of his buddy exacting revenge. Why the beginning of this generation didn't immediately embrace traditional third-person controls, I don't really know. Did they just not exist back then? I'd be curious to find out why this is.
Your only respawn points are supply caches, which is fine except 1) many of them are really high up, which makes them a pain in the ass to get to and a pain in the ass to get down from, and 2) their placement is occasionally nonsensical. The Volk island is split into two halves, and there are NO SUPPLY CACHES in the northern half. Why? Who thought this was a great idea? Spending a few minutes after every death having to climb down a skyscraper and run across a third of the island just to get back to a boss encounter is incredibly annoying.
Anyways. I'm still only halfway? through the game, and though I'm pretty sure I'll finish it, it's a hard game to love so far removed from its initial release. It's been a while since I've felt this way about a game that until recently was part of this generation, so it's fascinating to see how far we've come over the last eight years despite my annoyances.
Some games age better than others. Crackdown suffers particularly badly in this department. I know Crackdown was well received, so I'm trying to give it the benefit of the doubt, but it's really hard not to think that everything it does has been better achieved by later games. Getting around the world is incredibly painful, for example. Minor innovations introduced in franchises like Infamous or Assassin's Creed have greatly improved the basic act of climbing the side of a building. Crackdown feels like an early prototype of those same systems.
There aren't enough handholds on building walls, especially in places where you'd think there would be one. You're constantly running into small overhangs when trying to climb a building, and there's precious little you can do to climb past one. Even basic things like trying to climb a series of balconies can often fail because you might fly just slightly too far away from a balcony and then suddenly be unable to grab a ledge, causing you to fall to the ground (and sometimes your death). This happens even when you're not providing any input on the left stick, which you'd think would just mean "jump straight up and catch the next ledge." Which it does, about 60% of the time.
Aiming is kind of a pain, seemingly taking a page from Grand Theft Auto 3's lock-on aiming system (or at least I think it is, I played the vast majority of the GTA3 trilogy on PC). When it works, it's fine, though obviously arcade-like in execution. But all too often, it'll lock onto a far away target when you're getting punched by three dudes, or it'll lock onto a car instead of the driver that just got out, or you'll lock onto a person you just killed instead of his buddy exacting revenge. Why the beginning of this generation didn't immediately embrace traditional third-person controls, I don't really know. Did they just not exist back then? I'd be curious to find out why this is.
Your only respawn points are supply caches, which is fine except 1) many of them are really high up, which makes them a pain in the ass to get to and a pain in the ass to get down from, and 2) their placement is occasionally nonsensical. The Volk island is split into two halves, and there are NO SUPPLY CACHES in the northern half. Why? Who thought this was a great idea? Spending a few minutes after every death having to climb down a skyscraper and run across a third of the island just to get back to a boss encounter is incredibly annoying.
Anyways. I'm still only halfway? through the game, and though I'm pretty sure I'll finish it, it's a hard game to love so far removed from its initial release. It's been a while since I've felt this way about a game that until recently was part of this generation, so it's fascinating to see how far we've come over the last eight years despite my annoyances.
