Guitar Hero 2 (Xbox 360)

On November 8, 2005 the world was introduced to the Guitar Hero franchise when the first Guitar Hero game was released for the PlayStation 2. The game's premise was simple: use a plastic guitar controller and follow the notes on an on-screen music chart to the tunes of 30 different classic and contemporary rock songs in order to earn fame, in-game money, additional songs, and additional characters. This simple concept (combined with a pretty awesome song list) propelled Guitar Hero to great success on the PlayStation 2 and prompted GH's publisher, Red Octane, to release a sequel. Guitar Hero 2 for the PlayStation 2 hit store shelves on November 7, 2006 and this month Xbox 360 owners got their first chance to play the now mega-popular music game. So is it worth the relatively high $90 price tag? Read on!

Story

There's really not a "story" in Guitar Hero 2, per se. The song is all about rockin' out to great songs and that's about it. That said, Guitar Hero 2 does have a career mode that has you starting out playing songs in a high school's "Battle of the Bands" and eventually working your way up to super stardom. There's not much in the way of storytelling in the career mode, though. Basically you beat a set of songs (usually 5 plus an encore), which in turn gets you noticed by a new sponsor (who gives you a little extra in-game cash to buy some new goodies) and also lets you play a new set of songs at a larger venue. This cycle of "play a set of songs, get a new sponsor, play at a larger venue" continues until you've played all of GH2's songs and venues. And while it's nice that the game uses real guitar companies like Ernie Ball as sponsors, GH2 is not the type of game you'll ever tell your friends has a great storyline.

Score: 50%

Gameplay

The gameplay in GH2 is both easy to learn and incredibly difficult to master. At its core, the gameplay consists of you holding down one of five colored buttons on the neck of your guitar and strumming the strum bar at the same time the corresponding colored dot is passing across the bottom of the screen. The more notes you hit in a row without messing up, the larger your score multiplier gets. So, for instance, if you hit 10 notes in a row your multiplier goes up to 2x, meaning that you get 100 points for each successful note instead of just 50. If you hit 20 notes in a row, the multiplier goes up to 3x, which gives you 150 points for every successful note. The multiplier maxes out at 4x (when you hit 30 notes in a row), but there is a way to temporarily double it by using "Star Power".

The "Star Power" meter is on the right side of your screen and is filled up whenever you successfully nail a set of notes that are shaped like colored stars rather than the normal colored circles. Each time you manage to hit every note in a star-shaped sequence of notes, your "Star Power" meter fills up. Once the meter is filled up halfway or more, you can begin using it by physically lifting the neck of your guitar to vertical (like you would if you were playing a real guitar and wanted to show off to the crowd). Once you do this, the "Star Power" meter begins to drain and until it is fully drained your score multiplier is doubled (up to a maximum of 8x) and the crowd reacts much more positively to notes that you play correctly. While both aspects of "Star Power" are important, the second part is crucial to remember at the higher difficulty levels because if you miss too many notes and the crowd is dissatisfied with your performance you will fail the song. Using "Star Power" when you're in danger of failing a song can help get the crowd back on your side and ensure that you survive to play another day. Although the penalty for failing a song isn't that drastic...you just have to try again.

If reading about how GH2 plays doesn't quite explain it well enough for you, I made this short tutorial video so that you can see how it looks in action.



As you beat songs in career mode you are awarded in-game money. The better you do on a song, the more money you get ($150 for 3 stars, $250 for 4 stars, and $600 for 5 stars). You can earn a maximum of $600 for each song at the Medium, Hard, and Expert difficulty levels (you don't get paid for beating songs on Easy mode). So theoretically if you earned 5 stars on "Message in a Bottle" on all 3 of those difficulty levels you'd be paid a total of $1800. With 48 songs to beat in the career mode, that means over $86,000. This money, combined with money you earn when you get a new sponsor, can be used in the in-game store to purchase new characters (3 extra are available), new outfits for your characters, new guitars, new finishes for your guitars, new songs (there are 26 extra songs by lesser-known artists available), and a couple behind the scenes videos about the making of Guitar Hero 2.

Suffice to say that if you enjoy listening to and/or playing rock music and are somewhat coordinated, the game isn't too difficult to learn. However, on the harder difficulty levels it will challenge even the most limber-fingered gamers (I am stuck on the song "Carry Me Home" on the Hard difficulty at the moment) as it throws a lot more notes and more complicated and faster-paced note patterns at the player, which keeps GH2 from being too easy and repetitive. Luckily, even when you're on a song that you're having trouble passing, the gameplay rarely crosses over from "fun" to "annoyingly frustrating." And if it does get to that point, there's a practice mode that lets you practice whatever part of the song you want to and at a slower pace.

All in all, the gameplay in Guitar Hero 2 is simple to learn, finger-numbingly difficult to master, and stays fun most of the time despite the incredibly difficulties at the harder settings.

Score: 95%

Graphics/Sound/Presentation

The presentation in GH2 is top-notch. While the chances are you won't be admiring the background visuals too much while you're concentrating on hitting every note in a song, the graphics have been optimized for the Xbox 360 and everything looks crisp and clear. You can also tell that the developers of GH2 had fun giving your guitarist funny animations and interesting camera angles. If you ever have a friend play while you watch, I'm sure you'll enjoy the look of the game.

But looks aside, a game like Guitar Hero 2 lives and dies with the soundtrack. Thankfully, GH2 delivers here in spades. To begin with, here's a list of all 48 of the songs you'll be playing in the career mode:

1. "Surrender" - Cheap Trick
2. "Possum Kingdom" - Toadies
3. "Heart-Shaped Box" - Nirvana
4. "Salvation" - Rancid
5. "Strutter" - Kiss
6. "Shout at the Devil" - Mötley Crüe
7. "Mother" - Danzig
8. "Life Wasted" - Pearl Jam
9. "Cherry Pie" - Warrant
10. "Woman" - Wolfmother
11. "You Really Got Me" - Van Halen
12. "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" - Spınal Tap
13. "Carry On Wayward Son" - Kansas
14. "Search and Destroy" - Iggy Pop and The Stooges
15. "Message in a Bottle" - The Police
16. "Billion Dollar Babies" - Alice Cooper
17. "Them Bones" - Alice in Chains
18. "War Pigs" - Black Sabbath
19. "Monkey Wrench" - Foo Fighters
20. "Hush" - Deep Purple
21. "Girlfriend" - Matthew Sweet
22. "Who Was in My Room Last Night?" - Butthole Surfers
23. "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" - The Rolling Stones
24. "Sweet Child O'Mine" - Guns N' Roses
25. "Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo" - Rick Derringer
26. "Tattooed Love Boys" - The Pretenders
27. "John the Fisherman" - Primus
28. "Jessica" - The Allman Brothers Band
29. "Bad Reputation" - Thin Lizzy
30. "Last Child" - Aerosmith
31. "Crazy on You" - Heart
32. "Trippin' On a Hole in a Paper Heart" - Stone Temple Pilots
33. "Dead!" - My Chemical Romance
34. "Killing in the Name" - Rage Against the Machine
35. "Freya" - The Sword
36. "Stop!" - Jane's Addiction
37. "Madhouse" - Anthrax
38. "The Trooper" - Iron Maiden
39. "Rock This Town" - Stray Cats
40. "Laid to Rest" - Lamb of God
41. "Psychobilly Freakout" - The Reverend Horton Heat
42. "YYZ" - Rush
43. "Beast and the Harlot" - Avenged Sevenfold
44. "Carry Me Home" - The Living End
45. "Institutionalized" - Suicidal Tendencies
46. "Misirlou" - Dick Dale
47. "Hangar 18" - Megadeth
48. "Free Bird" - Lynyrd Skynyrd
    

You may not recognize some of the song titles (especially if you grew up somewhat sheltered like me), but it's likely that when you play them you'll think "Oh yeah, I remember hearing that song before. I didn't know what it was called and didn't realize it was sung by that group." But after you've played GH2 for a bit, even the songs you've never heard of before might creep their way into your head. Be warned: you may find yourself headbanging and playing guitar in your head to Primus' "John the Fisherman" when you sleep, while you drive, when you're at work, etc. Although I won't lie: there are a couple songs (like "Laid to Rest") I wish they would have replaced with other, less scream-laden songs.

In terms of presentation, the menus in GH2 are all easy to navigate. The developers also added a nice touch by having funny screens while a song is loading (one tells you that if the audience is cheering for an encore you should never "just jam", a reference to the movie "This is Spinal Tap"). And I always laugh remembering how the game asked me 5 different times if I was reeaaaallly sure I wanted to play Free Bird as an encore. Good stuff.

Score: 90%

Multiplayer

GH2's multiplayer modes consist of "face off", "pro face off", and co-op. In face off, you and a friend both play your own guitars and play the same song at the same time. Whoever ends up with the best score at the end of the song wins. The nice thing about face off mode is that if you're much better at GH2 than your friend, you can choose a higher difficulty setting for yourself so that your friend isn't overwhelmed. But if you and your friend are equally skilled, you can compete against each other in "pro face off", which puts you both at the same difficulty level so that you're playing the exact same note charts.

Co-op is a little different. Instead of competing against your friend you are both cooperating to try and beat a song together. To do this, the one of you plays lead guitar and the other plays backup or bass guitar. To make things even more challenging, both of you have to raise your guitars at the same time to activate star power. This makes co-op a great mode as it encourages you to interact with your partner and adds a bit of variety for the person playing backup guitar.



Unfortunately, GH2 does not support any multiplayer modes online. This means that in order to enjoy any of the multiplayer modes you will probably have to buy a 2nd guitar controller (although you can play the game using a regular Xbox 360 controller, it's very awkward and really takes you out of the whole "kicking ass playing guitar" experience) - not an inexpensive proposition as extra guitars cost $60. The lack of online multiplayer is a true shame, as Xbox 360 gamers have become accustomed to such strong online support from the 360 development community. I suppose we can always cross our fingers that online will be added in a free update to the game, but the cynic in me tells me not to expect online multiplayer until Guitar Hero 3 arrives at the end of this year. So until then, we'll probably just have to settle for online leaderboards that tell you where you rank against your friends and the rest of the world on a song-by-song basis.

Score: 75%

Lasting Value

Guitar Hero 2 has a lot of things to do, especially for a game in this type of genre. While there are only 48 songs to beat in career mode, the additional 26 songs, characters, guitars, guitar finishes, and videos to unlock will keep you busy for quite a while. There are also a number of fun and interesting achievements to unlock which vary widely and include "Most Likely to Succeed Award" (get 5 stars on on songs on Medium), "Hendrix Award" (beat a song playing left-handed), "Life of the Party Award" (buy all characters in the in-game store), "Dimebag Darrell Award" (hit 100 notes in a row), and "Page & Plant Award" (hit 100% of the notes in co-op). And, of course, if you're a perfectionist then it may take you months (years?) to get 5 stars on every song on every difficulty.

In addition, GH2 for the Xbox 360 also supports downloadable songs on the Xbox Live Marketplace. The first three of these sets (each set includes 3 songs) have already arrived on the marketplace and give you the opportunity to play songs like "Higher Ground" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers or "Bark at the Moon" by Ozzy Osbourne. Unfortunately, the sets are priced ridiculously high and for a set of 3 songs you'll pay 500 MS points, which translates to $6.25. This is really unfortunate because the possibility of being able to buy more songs had excited most GH2 owners and the pricing really put a damper on that excitement. It also may have killed any review score bumps the game may have gotten based on the prospects of future songs. I think that if whoever made the decision had instead priced it at something more in line with iTunes' $1 per song pricing, the concept of buying more songs for your copy of GH2 really could've taken off and added a lot to the GH2 experience.

Score: 80%

Overall

Guitar Hero 2 is an extremely entertaining, fleshed out music/rhythm game. It's very easy to get the hang of and does an admirable job of ramping up the difficulty as you get more and more comfortable with the gameplay. And considering how quickly most other rhythm games get stale, Red Octane and Harmonix should be commended for adding enough songs and unlockables to the game to keep gamers coming back for quite some time. In addition, the co-op modes really add a lot to the game (if you have an extra guitar or a friend who has one, of course). Unfortunately, the lack of online multiplayer functionality and the grotesquely overpriced downloadable songs keep Guitar Hero 2 from ascending to the realm of the video game elite. Nevertheless, if you enjoy rhythm games or grew up listening to metal and alternative music I think you'll get your money's worth.

Overall Score: 85%

Worms (Xbox 360 Live Arcade)

"I got worms!" Normally not something you'd like to be saying, but when you're talking about the video game Worms, available on the Xbox 360's Live Arcade for $10, it's not a bad thing at all. In fact, it's actually quite good. And while newcomers to the Worms series may consider it to be one of the best Xbox Live Arcade games they've played yet, gamers who have played previous Worms games on the PC or older consoles like the Dreamcast might be slightly disappointed.

Story

There's really not any story to Worms, but considering this is a downloadable Live Arcade title and not a full retail $60 game on a disc, the lack of story doesn't really matter. While I suppose the makers of Worms could have made up some story to get you through the game's Challenge mode, I don't think it would have added any value. In summary, there is no story, but there doesn't need to be because that's not the type of game Worms is.

Score: N/A

Gameplay

Worms is a fairly straightforward game to play. Each game puts anywhere from 2 to 4 teams, each comprised of 4 worms, on a 2D playing field. Each team takes turns trying to eliminate the other teams' worms using a variety of standard (shotgun, grenade, mine, dynamite) and slightly more comical (exploding sheep, banana bombs, kamikaze) weapons until one team's worms are left standing. When it's your turn, you have 60 seconds to grab any weapon or health crates, position your worm, choose which weapon to use, aim, and fire. During this time you can also use a few special weapons to either reposition your worm to another part of the map (jetpack, ninja rope, teleport), fortify your position (girders), or burrow into the landscape for protection (blowtorch).


If no teams have emerged victorious within 20 minutes, the game reduces the life of every worm to 1 and water levels begin to rise after every team's turn (worms die when they are in the water). This effectively keeps games from turning into hour-long marathons, although I wish there were an option to lengthen or shorten the time for this to happen.

Worms has basically three modes: Multiplayer, Practice, and Challenge. I'll wait to discuss Multiplayer in that section, but Challenge lets you take your custom team (or you can use one of the teams that come with the game) and take them through a series of progressively tougher challenges. There are a total of 20 challenges in all, and to get through them you'll have to have some pretty good strategic, aiming, and distance-judging skills. Unfortunately, even the best players may have trouble beating a few of the challenges (I'm looking at you, challenges 13, 19, and 20) without having to resort to cheesy tactics. This is largely because the computer worms on the higher levels have ungodly skills. You can have a worm sitting on the opposite end of the map, protected from every angle except for a seemingly impenetrable hole above, and somehow the computer will manage to throw a grenade across the map, bounce it off 3 walls, have it fall through the hole and land on your worm's head for a killing blow. This type of thing can be infuriating when you're on your 10th try to beat a particular challenge, and I really wish Team 17 would've made the worms slightly more human when it comes to those types of shots. Personally, I managed to beat every challenge except 20 "the right way", but it's a shame that you have to abandon any attempts to use real skill and resort to cheap tactics at all.

Practice mode lets you set up the game conditions to your liking (number of teams, which weapons each team starts with, which randomly generated map you'd like, etc) and hone your skills against the computer. While this is a quick and easy way to jump into a game when you don't have time to do a challenge or play with a friend online, I wish they would have given you more options when it comes to setting up your games. You can't adjust things like the amount of time each player has during their turn, how long it is until sudden death begins, etc. And despite being able to choose weapon sets you want each team to start with, you can't actually adjust how much of each individual weapon you want each team to get. Not the end of the world, but more control over matches would have been nice.


Overall, the gameplay in Worms is fairly straightforward, and after a few games I'm confident most people will fully grasp how it is played. Unfortunately, for devotees of the older Worms games, the game might be a bit too straightforward. It's probably something that newcomers won't think about, but the older Worms games had a much larger selection of weapons to choose from including favorites like the Holy Hand Grenade, the Longbow, and the baseball bat. Also missing from this version of Worms are many voice banks for your custom teams. So unless it comes out as downloadable content (and that'll be a shame), your custom worms teams can't have Scottish accents.

Score: 80%

Graphics/Sound/Presentation

Worms has never been a game that you used to show off the graphical capabilities of your system, and this game is no exception. There are no amazing particle effects, no Matrix-style 3D zooms showing replays of you blowing up other worms in slow motion, no nothing. The game is a cartoony, 2D game, and that's it. That said, for a $10 Live Arcade game it looks very nice running in high-definition. The graphics are crisp and comical, and having extra space to see when you play on a widescreen TV is a welcome addition to the Worms series.

Audibly, Worms does a good job of mixing cartoony voices with good, clear weapon sounds. Considering the entire game downloads at under 50MB, the variety and clarity of the sounds is admirable. Although, as I've mentioned already, I do wish some of the classic voices for teams of worms were in the game. Perhaps including them would have pushed the size of the game over Microsoft's 50MB limit for Live Arcade games, but I sincerely hope they're not added later on as "premium content" that you have to pay for.

Score: 85%

Multiplayer

Probably the best way to play Worms is against friends. Beating the computer is one thing, but it doesn't compare to the satisfaction of beating a friend. And the computer can't laugh along with you when one of you does something stupid or makes an insanely good shot. Local multiplayer has you and up to 3 friends duking it out (you can each have your own controller and I believe, though I haven't tested, you can also pass one controller around) on your TV. On Live, you can play with up to 3 other people. In this case, whoever is hosting the game chooses the options (which map type to use, which weapon set everybody starts out with) and then starts the game. When the game ends, people can leave or choose to stay and continue playing each other. And barring immature 12 year olds, Worms is the type of game the Xbox Live headset was made for (and you can tell who is speaking by looking at the top left of the screen, where a worm icon with the color of the speaking person's team will show up).


Two things are slightly disappointing about multiplayer. First, in my experiences online it can sometimes be buggy trying to get a game started. Some friends and I tried to set up a tournament and I was unable to host a game because one of the guys kept having trouble connecting to my game. But when he hosted it and we all joined his game, everything was fine. Perhaps this isn't a problem with Worms so much as with Xbox Live's lack of dedicated servers for games, but it's still an unpleasant experience.

The other kind of weird thing about online multiplayer is the language filter in the game. I can understand Team 17 and/or Microsoft not wanting people to be naming their worms "Shithead", but the extent to which names online are moderated is almost laughable. For instance, I was trying to put together a team of worms named after my favorite characters in the movie Spaceballs, but when I took the team online the game automatically renamed my worm "Barf" to "Immoral". The game also took exception to the team name "Spaceballs", presumably because of "balls". Another friend of mine tried to name worms after different fruits, but the game wouldn't allow "Grape" (again renaming it to "Immoral"), possibly because of "rape" being in the name. This type of thing isn't a huge deal and you can usually figure out comparable names that it won't censor and still fit the theme you're trying to put together for your team, but it is a bit silly that it's so strict.

Score: 80%

Lasting Value

While Worms has the potential to entertain you online for quite a while, once you've beaten all 20 challenges and unlocked all of the achievements in the game (Achievements you'll likely earn mostly by playing through the Challenge mode once) there's not a whole lot else to do alone. There is always the promise of extra downloadable content, but even if they add a few new voice banks for teams or some new weapons, the single-player modes in Worms won't keep you interested for too long. So if you don't have Xbox Live's gold membership (which lets you play other people online), you may not get your money's worth. But if you do, Worms should definitely be worth the $10.

Score: 60%

Overall

Worms is a fun, lighthearted, straightforward turn-based game that will get your competitive juices flowing when you play other friends and will present you a decent challenge when you're playing alone. It looks great on an HDTV and the funny sayings the worms have will make you laugh for a while. If only they'd made the computer a little more error prone in Challenge mode, given you more control over how your matches are played, added more voices, and added more weapons, this could have been the best Worms yet. That said, if you have Xbox Live gold (the one you pay annually for) and haven't ever played Worms, download this game immediately. It's well worth the $10. On the other hand, if you've played old Worms games, playing in HD doesn't do anything for you, and you don't care about egging your friends on with voice chat, you may just want to stick with an old PC version.

Overall Score: 79%

Crackdown (Xbox 360)

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If this is the case, the video game industry is (and has historically been) chock-full of flattery. Ever since the days of poorly-written Pac-Man imitators, many game makers have been keeping a watchful eye on the market and trying to duplicate the successes of breakout hits in hopes to make a quick buck. One of the most popular series of games in history is the Grand Theft Auto series - a series widely credited with creating the "open world" genre of video games. GTA has spawned numerous knockoff games like True Crime, Saints Row, and The Godfather. And while these knockoffs are sometimes decent, they seldom live up to the games that inspired them.

Crackdown, published by Microsoft and available for the Xbox 360, is a different story. While Crackdown does have its share of similarities with the GTA games (you play in three different cities, run around shooting people and picking up different weapons, can carjack anybody, etc), it also does a number of things differently (both good and bad) to differentiate itself from the ever-growing crowd of GTA and GTA-inspired video games. For instance, while most of the other open-world games place you into the role of a criminal intent on building his power and influence within the criminal community, Crackdown puts you squarely into the shoes of a cop with the single-minded goal of eliminating the criminal element in the cities. And instead of being a normal guy (albeit a guy who can be shot a number of times and be a-okay after a few minutes) like in most other open-world games, in Crackdown you are actually a super cop with the ability to jump amazing distances, pick up and throw things no normal human could throw, etc. And rather than going for a gritty, realistic look like most GTA and GTA clones do, Crackdown has a less realistic, more stylized cel-shaded graphical style. Suffice to say that while the game could be considered a GTA clone, Crackdown does a few things differently to immediately set it apart from the rest of the imitators.

Story

Crackdown's story pretty much boils down to this: there are three cities you have been sworn to protect which are controlled by three different gangs, and you need to use any force necessary to kill each gang's leaders and bring peace to the cities. There's really very little else in the way of a story in Crackdown. While each gang henchman you pursue has a short (think 10 seconds) video that plays when you are initially instructed to kill them and another one after you have eliminated them, the story in Crackdown is more or less inconsequential to the game. There are no "twists" throughout the game to keep you emotionally invested in why you are going after each target. None of them killed your sister's dog's brother's owner's paperboy ("What does that make us?" "Absolutely nothing."), none of them are your long-lost twin brother. Heck, none of them even have super-human powers like you do. It's just your super-powered bad-assedness against a flood of seemingly neverending gang members armed with guns, rocket launchers, and grenades. The only thing that could be considered a story twist in the game happens at the very end, but I won't ruin it.

Score: 50%

Gameplay

While Crackdown's story may be weak (or nonexistent), the gameplay is where the game shines. As I've mentioned, the majority of the time you're playing Crackdown you will be doing nothing but jumping from rooftop to rooftop killing bad guys, driving cars and running over bad guys, picking up semi trucks and throwing them at bad guys...do you see a pattern here? But what keeps the gameplay in Crackdown from getting stale is that there are lots of ways to dispose of these street thugs, and all of them are fun and generally very easy to do.

Throughout the game, the disembodied voice that feeds you information about the gangs also gives you tips about what's going on around you. He notifies you of a car race nearby that you can participate in, he tells you when a hit squad has been dispatched to get rid of you, he informs you when you've accidentally killed too many pedestrians and are now on the police squad's **** list, etc. But one thing he constantly reminds you of is that you get "Skills for kills, agent. Skills for kills." You see, when you begin the game you may be a super cop, but you're not as super as you could be. Rather, you start off with five different sets of skills that all start off at zero. As you increase these skills you gain levels (up to a maximum of 4), and as you reach a new level in each skill you get better at that skill.

For instance, to level up your strength skill you need to kill baddies by punching them, kicking them, or throwing things (or people) at them. As you do this, your strength will increase and you will be able to pick up progressively heavier objects, throw objects further, kick bodies for longer distances, etc. Leveling other abilities works in a similar manner. The more gang members you run over with your car, the better you get at driving (which makes cars easier to handle and, at the highest level, gives the 3 special "agency vehicles" special powers). The more people you kill with guns, the better you are at shooting (which lets you zero in on them with your aim - done with the left trigger - more quickly). Killing baddies with a grenade or rocket launcher increases your explosives skill, which increases the damage and radius of the explosions you create.

Agility is slightly different. Although it can be increased by killing gang members while jumping high in the air, there is also another way to level the skill. Scattered throughout the city - usually perched at the tops of buildings or other high-altitude locations - are glowing green orbs called Agility Orbs. As you collect them your agility skill increases, which in turn lets you jump higher and fall further without taking damage. Early in the game you will find a number of these orbs that are impossible to reach with your current jumping skills. However, you'll find that once you've gotten 2 or 3 (and definitely 4) stars in agility, snagging these elusive orbs is a piece of cake. This gameplay dynamic gives you a reason to come back to cities you've purged of criminals long ago, and gives Crackdown a replayability factor that most other open world games lack.

In addition to the Agility Orbs, there are also 300 "Secret Orbs" strewn about the three cities. The placement of these differs from the Agility Orbs. Whereas you can usually see Agility Orbs from high up above on rooftops, Secret Orbs are usually well-hidden inside of corridors, in between exhaust pipes, and in other harder-to-see places. Luckily, Secret Orbs make a distinctive pulsating sound that alerts you to their presence so it's not all guesswork. Also unlike Agility Orbs, when you find a Secret Orb it actually gives all five of your stats a slight bump rather than just increasing one skill.

One other thing to mention is that there's virtually no penalty for dying in Crackdown. While you may have to respawn your body at a supply point and run back to your latest target's stronghold to try and take him on again, any progress that you made in terms of skills you gained are automatically saved when you drop dead. This is a nice game mechanic that helps to keep Crackdown's tougher bosses from becoming overly frustrating, because even if you're dying you know that you're making progress towards leveling your skills, and with those increased skills that boss probably won't be as difficult to defeat.

Score: 90%

Graphics/Sound/Presentation

As I mentioned earlier, Crackdown's graphics don't strive for realism. Instead, the game has a slightly less realistic (although I don't know if "cartoony" is the right adjective), cel-shaded look. But don't be confused: this is no kid's game and we're not talking about the type of cartoony cel-shading in games like Zelda: The Wind Waker. This look, at least in my opinion, was a brilliant decision for a few reasons. First, it helps Crackdown break free from the look of other GTA-type games. Second, it helps to keep things less serious and more fantastical. In other words, while you're playing Crackdown you're more likely to be thinking about how interesting or even beautiful some of the most typically banal real-life city things like freeways and hotels look instead of being reminded of real violence on the evening news. And I think that's a good thing.

While the graphics are a strength of the game, possibly the greater achievement is how well the game runs. Even when there are explosions everywhere, bullet trails whizzing by you, and tons of gang members, cars, and pedestrians on the screen, the framerate rarely stutters. The animations in the game are also pretty good, although once in a while it can look a bit robotic when you’re trying to pick up an object that’s in a slightly weird position.

Even more impressive is the complete lack of load times as you travel from city to city. So when you’re traveling from the Volk city to the Shai-Gen city, there will be absolutely zero loading time during the transition. It may seem a small detail, but after playing other open-world games that pause and make you load up the next city when you're moving between them, you really appreciate how this lack of loading times keeps you in the game.

The amazing draw distance is also an impressive feat. In many other open world games, you can’t look across the city from the top of a building and see every little detail of the city (and the surrounding cities). But in Crackdown, if you’re at a high enough elevation you can pretty much see every part of all of the cities and the proceed to run to the furthest edges with absolutely no loading times and non pop-in. This is most apparent from the highest point in the game: the top of the Agency Tower. This tower is a central hub between all 3 cities, and is also where your police force is headquartered. Once you get your agility skill high enough, you can actually climb your way to the top of it and see every single landmark in the game. It’s an incredibly visceral feeling to get to the top of the keep, look at the amusement park on the far end of one of the cities, and know that if you wanted to, you could get to that Ferris wheel.

The sound in Crackdown is about what you'd expect. Gang members yell when they see you, tires squeal as you peel out, explosions rock your speakers when you blow up a car with a rocket launcher, etc. There's nothing to memorable, audio-wise, but it's also not at all bad.

Score: 85%

Multiplayer

If you feel like playing Crackdown with a friend online, you’re in luck. The game offers you the ability to invite a friend to your game at any time. When your friend accepts your invite, your progress in the single-player game is saved and both of you will be taken to a short loading screen. You can then choose at which supply point you’d like to spawn. At this point, you’re both playing your single-player campaign together. So if you’re having trouble with a certain boss I’d highly suggest inviting an online friend into your game so that you can tackle the boss together.

But even though you can, you and your friend don’t need to necessarily team up to beat the game together. Instead, you can spend hours just running around, racing each other, jumping to the tops of high buildings and then throwing the other off, driving in the same car (one person drives, the other rides – sadly the passenger can’t shoot out of the window), etc. And while a friend joining your game isn’t quite as seamless as in a game like Gears of War, it’s nice that when your friend accepts your invite you will not lose any of your progress in the single-player game - and even nicer that you can beat the game together and it’ll save your progress for when you’re playing solo again.

Score: 90%

Lasting Value

The campaign in Crackdown is not incredibly long. Playing alone you could probably beat the game in 10 hours or less. And with a friend, even less time than that. Fortunately, even after you beat the game there are lots of reasons to come back for more. There are a number of road races that you can do that are fun to try and beat (and they also increase your driving skill). There are also agility races which require you to jump from point to point to point (usually these points are high up on rooftops, so you’re jumping from rooftop to rooftop) within a certain amount of time. These races, similar to the driving ones, increase your agility skill.

Aside from the races are the quests to gather all 500 Agility Orbs, all 300 Secret Orbs, and to completely max out your character’s stats. In addition to a feeling of satisfaction from knowing you’ve really explored every corner of the sprawling city, all of these give you an Achievement on your Xbox Live gamer profile.

Speaking of achievements, the team behind Crackdown did a nice job of giving you a variety of goals. Achievements range from the simple (“Eliminate the first of 21 gang bosses” or “Execute a 6-second jump in a vehicle”) to the amusing (“Use explosives to keep a body up in the air for 10 seconds” or “Shoot and kill 5 gang members in a single jump - while airborne”) to the just plain difficult (“Collect 300 Hidden Orbs”). But even for the most difficult ones, I’m pretty confident that you’ll have fun earning all 1000 of Crackdown’s Achievement points.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that Microsoft is planning on releasing downloadable content for Crackdown which could provide even more free-roaming fun.

The only complaint I have about the lasting value of Crackdown is that could stand to have minigames thrown in. I know lots of people who spent hours playing GTA3 trying to blow up cars using the remote-control car, and adding in little touches like that (Crackdown has an amusement park in one of the cities, for goodness sake!) would have given Crackdown owners even more reasons to come back.

Score: 80%

Overall

Crackdown may have started out as just another GTA clone, but the final game is a lot more than that. Between the unique art/graphic style, the superhero protagonist, the complete lack of load times between cities, the fun implementation of online multiplayer, the hunt for Agility and Secret orbs, and the varying Achievements, Crackdown’s uniqueness may have just ruined plain old “normal” GTA-type games for me forever. This game is definitely worth your money.

Overall Score: 86%