Here's a trick for game designers: Solve this puzzle. See that red "C" with the white around it? I can't go five steps out of that without being yelled at. See those triangles? Those are all on a roof of a building. The building below, in fact. The very same building that I can't climb without automatically failing the mission because I don't want to pay upwards of $10 a month to play with an uppity twelve-year old with a mouth foul enough to make Quentin Tarantino blush. And yet, Ruffian Games expects people to know how to pass this part in single player. Stunning, figuring the only thing they did was reskin the original game.
So, here's the puzzle: If Ruffian Games are professionals (from teams that made the original Crackdown as well as Project Gotham Racing, the only car racing game I can control), how did they screw up on this massive of a level? See, Crackdown is a game where you should be able to climb buildings easily. Yet, in this one, you can't because a protrusion juts out to keep you from the ceiling. Oh, and this one? The ledges are too high for you to reach at maximum agility level, so you have to go over four buildings and climb them to even get to the roof of this one. When you do that, you fail the mission. I'm not the only one who caught this, as Jim Sterling of Destructoid has too: "Some of the missions are broken, too. One tactical location is actually impossible to complete in single-player, because leaving the location's radius causes the mission to be lost. Unfortunately, all the Cell soldiers that need killing at at the top of a building that requires players to leave the radius in order to climb. Without a second player, this mission simply cannot be completed. It's oversights like that are simply inexcusable in a game where the developer did very little of their own original work."
What else is broken? Targeting. Imagine that you have a guy blasting at you from five feet away, a cop minding his own business, and a cow. You'll aim at the guy trying to kill you, right? The agent will opt for the cow about 80% of the time, and the cop roughly 18% of the time. By the time you actually aim for the guy who is killing you, you're either dead or need to retreat. Or, you'll have to buy a grill for some hamburgers.
Finally, though, something that isn't broken in the game, but is purely unusual. Instead of the old agent, you play as a new one. One of the agent skins in this one, I kid you not, looks like Dr. Gregory House on steroids. If I'm looking to play as someone intimidating, I can think of better designs than a misanthropic doctor. But, admittedly, it is kind of awesome. It'd be more awesome if the show wasn't a complete waste of time anymore, though.
So, back on track. Crackdown 2 is not worthy of being called an original title. It's also not worthy of being called a single player game. If designers want to make a multiplayer game, don't put single player campaigns in it. Its just that simple. Next time, I'm going to try to find a good design to talk about. It might be a game, it might not. But, I need to stop the negative speak while I can.
- Ben
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