While out shopping a few months ago I decided to find myself a new game to play on my Xbox 360. I wanted something that would be good fun, would last a while but also something that I could pick up and be playing and having fun for just a few minutes at a time. After looking at various games I picked up Crackdown for the bargain price of £6.

It was a game I didn't really know a huge amount about but I had seen a lot of people saying it was good
fun on a gaming forum I frequent, so I decided to give it a whirl. The basic premise of the game is that crime has over run the world (which comprises of three islands linked by a road network), the police force, under the name of The Agency; who are located in a huge three towered Building in the centre of the world; is trying hard but failing to make any impact on the high levels of criminal activity. As a last resort, The Agency has copied/stolen the work of a criminal scientist who has been developing genetically engineered criminals.

The Agency creates a prototype genetically engineered Agent to fight crime using whatever means necessary. Stronger, faster and tougher than any other person, the Agent (you) sets about getting rid of the three criminal gangs that run the three islands. To do so you must explore the island and find information about the various underbosses of the gang. As you kill each underboss, the gang is weakened, and as such your chances of killing the gang's kingpin (Boss) increase.

To help in your task The Agency provides you with three special vehicles, a sports car, and SUV and a Truck which are located in the garage in the Agency's Tower. In addition to these you can also comandeer any vehicle you come across in the city.

The game esentially works in very much the same way as Grand Theft Auto, in that you are free to explore a
fully living and breathing city getting on with the games storyline as and when you want but also able to do your own thing as you want too.

As you explore the city, and kill gang members, you will gradually increase your core skills, these are agility, strength, driving skills, explosive skills and firearms skills. As they increase you evelove and percome more and more powerful.

To increase your agility there are 500 green orbs located around the game for you to collect, as you increase your agility you can jump higher and higher, until once fully leveled up you can jump several storeys high allowing you to explore areas of the city you were previously unable to reach. There are also rooftop races to take part in against the clock and earn you agility points when you beat the set time.

Killing gang members with guns increases your firearms skill, which leads to increased accuracy, Killing with explosives increaes your explosive skills making explosions you cause bigger and more powerful...when
fully levelled up you can cause carnage on a rather epic scale!!

To increase your strength, you simple kill gang members by, punching, kicking or stamping them to death, wonderfully unsavoury and extremely satisfying!

Driving skills can be increased by either, killing gang members by running them over, or performing jumps and stunts in a vehicle (there are numerous hidden stunt markers around the city for you to try to jump through - along with handy ramp trucks you can position as you please..) or by taking part n races against the clock. As your driving skills evolve the Agency vehicles evolve with you and, once you have full driving skills, are pretty much unrecognisable and awesome! The sports cars is super fast and has machine guns, the SUV has hydrolic suspension and allows you to jump and even driving up the side of buildings! The Truck becomes a massive cab capable of smashing and destroying any vehicle off the road!

There are also Hidden Orbs hiding all around the game, these help to increase all of your stats, and are quite satisfy to find.

This leveling up, sounds like it could be rather boring and lead to grinding away to get yourself leveled up but in reality it's nothing like that, if you just play the game, either hunting down underbosses and killing them, or just playing around, jumping about and killing gang members etc you will finding yourself increasing in skills without really trying.

It is only when you get the a four star rating and working towards being fully leveled up will you find yourself having to actively work on various skills.

When playing games like GTA in the past, I have found the games narrative uninvolving and rather boring as I do tend to be rather a casual gamer and this leads to me just messing around in the gameworld and getting bored, however with Crackdown I found the, albeit simplistic, narrative good fun and simple enough to draw me in and although I did spend a good deal of time messing around exploring and randomly killing gang members, I really wanted to play the game through and kill all the gang bosses.

However I was playing the game it was great fun. The games mechanic of giving you someone that can jump so high that you can climb the tallest of buildings and strong enough to pick up pretty much anything and throw it about, is brilliant.

When my brother asked me recently what Crackdown was like, I described it as basically being able to play GTA the way you've always wanted to, leaping about, exploring anywhere you can see and causing huge amounts of destruction..and having a huge amount of fun!!!

I'd higly recommend this game, especially as it can be picked up so cheaply!!!