Crackdown 2’s largely the same as the last one, and that, oddly, is its most overwhelmingly positive feature. Clearly, somebody at Ruffian decided very early on to follow the old ‘if it ain’t broke…’ mantra, and retain most, if it not all, of the features that made its predecessor one of the best-loved open-world mayhem-fests of the 360’s lifetime. Luckily, a number of additions are also now present to enrich the mixture ever further.

All in a day's work

You’re still a soulless, cloned Agent, and you’re still working for the clearly morally suspect law-enforcement ‘Agency’ of Pacific City. While plot is absolutely the last thing on anybody’s minds, a useful summary of circumstances is that, after a ten-year period of peace since your last Agent cleaned up the city in the first game, trouble’s rearing its head again. This time, it seems that the populace has begun to react against the Agency’s arguable reign of terror, setting up a rebel organisation called The Cell, which is popping up around the place, disrupting the flow of the Agency’s ‘peacekeeping’. That’s not all. When night falls, the streets are lined with the hideous mutant Freaks, victims of a mysterious virus that’s sweeping its way through the city’s populace.

That’s the flimsy premise, but here’s the reality: Crackdown 2 is still almost exclusively about running around the whole city, entirely at will, collecting stuff, or otherwise developing your Agent’s personal skill stats to make him stronger, faster, more agile, a better shot, etc. You’ll still spend many happy hours scaling the heights of the now far more vertical city, collecting those elusive green orbs or charging around the streets punching anyone and everyone in the face in order to beef up your melee powers.

The Cell, then, are basically brand new cannon fodder for your shooting skills, pouring as they are in unlimited amounts out of vans and hideouts for the duration of the game. The Freaks, meanwhile, are the perfect conceit to encourage serious progress in your driving, which was always the poor relation in the first game, as it required mastery of stunts and jumps to get past the first couple of levels. Now, the night time streets become scenes of zombie-splatting carnage, as hundreds of the shambling fools line the streets, proving sitting ducks to burst through in your car, showering the streets with buckets of bright green gruel.

Kicking cars. More fun than it sounds

On top of this, there are now roving ‘rogue’ orbs that follow their own paths around the landscape, which can be chased on foot in the case of the Agility variants, or raced around crazy preset circuits in a vehicle, with huge bonuses available for their capture. Aside from this, it’s the usual rooftop footrace challenges and driving races from before, with the only other distractions from the main thrust coming in the form of securing Tactical Locations, which are a hangover of the previous title’s Agency drop point recoveries, in which a certain local area needs to be cleared of Cell activity in order to be regained by the Agency. There’s also the brand new Freak Breaches, which are largely the same idea, but involve killing a finite number of Freaks instead of Cell troopers.

… continued