Crackdown (Xbox 360)

The Supercar makes the Batmobile look tame and comes with a nice pair of twin machine-guns for dishing out damage. The SUV becomes an acrobatic dream and can spin, roll and even use its suspension to turn a normal jump into a thing of beauty. The Truck Cab transforms into a road-warrior death-machine that will blast anything out of the way and keep on going, able to absorb quite a lot of damage in the process. It also comes with NoS for that extra burst of metal-crunching speed.

Explosives increase your blast radius, damage and amount of force. Firearms allow you to take more accurate shots, reload quicker and so on. You can increase these one at a time, or by doing various combinations you can pull in those XP orbs in a mix. Shoot a few bad guys, toss a grenade or fire a rocket and you’ll soon be earning points like there’s no tomorrow.

If you can get up high enough and grab a sniper rifle, you’ll increase both Athletics and Firearms.

You can target specific areas of a person, or a vehicle whilst locked on, the lock on system needs a way to quickly switch targets and feels a little clunky – having the pin-point mode makes it more fun however.

There are unlockable spawn-points, known as Supply Points that allow you to move quickly around the city and respawn if you die. Once you take one over you’ll be able to bring gang weapons back to unlock them for your use. And that’s the crux of gameplay in Crackdown, to take down the gangs. You do this by taking out the gang members, then tracking down the various generals that the Agency feeds you intel on and finally once you’ve taken all the generals down, you get a crack at the Kingpin.

Or you can go in guns blazing and try to kill the Kingpin right at the start, but your odds of survival will usually be extremely low as the leader will have some serious protection to keep you at bay. After you wipe out a Kingpin, Los Muertos, Volk, or Shai-Gen, you get one final crime – deal with that and the gang are gone from the city.

As you wipe out the gangs you’ll see less litter on the streets and the city will look brighter, cleaner. There will be less violence and people will be a lot happier.

You can complete road races, stunt challenges, rooftop races and each of these will also help you increase those skills of yours. But that’s about it, there’s only one other thing you can do apart from blowing things up (satisfying as it is) and that’s team up over Live or a Network, play co-op with a friend and take down gang members together.

The co-op part of the game should have been a dream, but it seems as though not a lot of thought went into it. There are times when you’re both in other areas of the city and you notice that your friend has killed off your particular gang-boss. You can’t pool your resources, so any Supply Points aren’t shared between you and your buddy; they have to unlock them as well.