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Crackdown: GTA, Has Relevance Stopped Returning Your Calls?
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One Game Feature by Daniel Dujnic, 11/20/07
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I spent the first few minutes of Crackdown trying to learn the map. After following the first couple things the narrator told me (he's very informative, overall, even if he goes senile later in the game), I saw a purple spire of light and made right for it in my all-terrain non-flippable SUV. Following that bee-line actually involved going over a highway, down onto the low road, and then rolling off a cliff and into the purple light. Score one point for Crackdown fixing something annoying about GTA. The car righted itself every time and that made me happy. I could be as reckless as I wanted to be with the vehicle without having to worry about the punishing walk back to the main road to find another car. That brought me sheer joy.
Actually, even if a car did strand me (they can blow up), Crackdown doesn't have the other GTA disease that would leave you without a car exactly when you needed one. I now understand why I endured the pain of GTA's car-starved streets: I didn't think there was an option. Well, to be honest there was no other option until now.
The Crackdown world is a busy fucking place. There are people constantly after you, on foot and in cars. If you are out of the action, it takes exactly 5 seconds to reengage because the protagonist of Crackdown is infinitely more mobile than Tommy Vercetti ever could be.
I could go on all day, but the point is that the purple spire was a race, I tried to use it to learn the map, and then got distracted when I started having fun. There is so much to learn, develop, and grow that it's akin to kindergarten. Weapons, cars, scaling buildings, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, dropping in the center of your enemies from hundreds of feet above and laying them to waste - this is what you want when you're five.
What a relief. It's like they created an 'Arcade Mode' for GTA where the action never stops, but neither does the progress, even when you're just messing around trying to climb the ferris wheel. Rockstar is clearly shitting in their pants, which is why GTA4 was delayed until 'sometime between the beginning of February and the end of forever.' Technical issues? Maybe. Maybe they suddenly they realized they have real competition, and doing the same shit with better graphics isn't going to fly.
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'GTA, Has Relevance Stopped Returning Your Calls?'
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#&rendershop#
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