FrostyMelon
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2006
- Messages
- 158
It looks like ALL copies of Crackdown will have the Halo 3 beta invite:
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/758/758236p1.html
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/758/758236p1.html
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Crackdown xbox360 demo
- Thread starter Nettwerk
- Start date
MrBojangels
Gawd
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2006
- Messages
- 763
So no, but still it sucks...I think only first day releases should have the invite....what is the fun of being in the beta when everyone and their mother is to?
Besides playing Halo 3 months in advanced and having plenty of people online so you can always find a game?
FrostyMelon
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2006
- Messages
- 158
Correction noted.Thanx.
kelbear really does a good job of summarizing my demo impressions, now that I've had some extended playtime. There's a lot of good stuff, but the variety really seems lacking, and every so often, something totally weird and unexpected happens. I'd also add that:
1. Stuff thrown at you by enemies seems to do insane damage (aka, insta-kill), which makes the lack of damage that tossing a car at enemies does doubly maddening.
2. Aim-lock works great, except it needs to auto-cycle once an enemy is dead - always.
3. The armor indicator is a little hard to read.
4. Maybe I just missed it, but this game needs driving directions. I found myself getting lost constantly.
For all of that, though, there's plenty of fun to be had, and some of the combat is absolutely nuts (kicking someone off a ten story building, jumping over a building and gunning them the entire time, shooting someone's legs out and tossing a grenade at them, etc.). I'll wait for the reviews - I predict an 8.5/10 or so.
1. Stuff thrown at you by enemies seems to do insane damage (aka, insta-kill), which makes the lack of damage that tossing a car at enemies does doubly maddening.
2. Aim-lock works great, except it needs to auto-cycle once an enemy is dead - always.
3. The armor indicator is a little hard to read.
4. Maybe I just missed it, but this game needs driving directions. I found myself getting lost constantly.
For all of that, though, there's plenty of fun to be had, and some of the combat is absolutely nuts (kicking someone off a ten story building, jumping over a building and gunning them the entire time, shooting someone's legs out and tossing a grenade at them, etc.). I'll wait for the reviews - I predict an 8.5/10 or so.
I've been going through maxing one skill at a time. Driving is much much more fun at higher levels. Just stick to the agency car as long as you can. Stuff you do to the city actually lasts a pretty long time in this game, and the Agency car has something 10x the hp of a regular car and way way more effective. Ever play Carmageddon? That's what these cars feel like at high levels, but manueverable too. The turn speed and acceleration early on is very slow.
Some people may have seen the IGN feature on the Driving skill, but in case they haven't...The info on the 3 cars is accurate, the supercar goes under and knocks cars up, the SUV goes over them, and the Truck Cab blows through them. That's their main specialties and they improve each level(the car morphs through each level everytime you get inside, very cool effect.). At level 4 the super car fires dual machine guns, the SUV monstertruck can jump, and the Truck Cab gets a speedboost(also it's an insta-kill when ramming after a certain speed is reached. I hit level 4 but didn't read the IGN feature and didn't know about these special abilities so I didn't look for the button that activated them.
Explosives skill was interesting. Shrapnel and handgrenades are mostly the same in result. However, the Limpet grenade is a remote control sticky grenade. So you can have it explode as soon as it touches down if you like, or stick it on a car and blow it up as it drives away. The skill simply upgrades in blast radius as you level up, it also affects cars and explosive barrels I believe. The level 4 blast radius is pretty damned impressive.
Since only the Limpet grenade could explode on contact, the enemies would run from the other 2 kinds of grenades. This left survivors at times or flaming soon-to-be-dead survivors. However, I noticed that enemies sometimes fell down. It dawned on me that pegging them in the face with a grenade would knock them down and trap them in the blast radius. Hilariously fun. This is a combination of the Shooting and Explosives skills using lock-aim, shooting allowed me to pick a target body part and how accurate I could tthrow. I realized that though I was seeing all the skills at max level, I won't be able to combine these experiences together.
Hopefully the full version will have a story narrative and more varied missions, I haven't even seen someone get in the car with me. However, being able to play with all skills at level 4 should be fun.
The city itself seems pretty small considering how fast you can cross the entire thing. Ability orbs, footrace, vehicle race, and stunts seem to be the only things to discover.
The strong enemies lift stuff from time to time, but are only encountered at max hostility and they can't really kill you if you're not willing to die. They do too little damage, die too fast, and it's too easy for you to escape. I haven't seen anything in this demo that really poses a threat to you so far. The only danger is when you fight lots and lots of enemies in the open with rifles without trying to take cover.
I think my final judgement of this game will be completely reliant on how enjoyable the storyline missions are and how much variety they bring. If these assasinations ARE the main focus of the game, this is a definite rental.
Some people may have seen the IGN feature on the Driving skill, but in case they haven't...The info on the 3 cars is accurate, the supercar goes under and knocks cars up, the SUV goes over them, and the Truck Cab blows through them. That's their main specialties and they improve each level(the car morphs through each level everytime you get inside, very cool effect.). At level 4 the super car fires dual machine guns, the SUV monstertruck can jump, and the Truck Cab gets a speedboost(also it's an insta-kill when ramming after a certain speed is reached. I hit level 4 but didn't read the IGN feature and didn't know about these special abilities so I didn't look for the button that activated them.
Explosives skill was interesting. Shrapnel and handgrenades are mostly the same in result. However, the Limpet grenade is a remote control sticky grenade. So you can have it explode as soon as it touches down if you like, or stick it on a car and blow it up as it drives away. The skill simply upgrades in blast radius as you level up, it also affects cars and explosive barrels I believe. The level 4 blast radius is pretty damned impressive.
Since only the Limpet grenade could explode on contact, the enemies would run from the other 2 kinds of grenades. This left survivors at times or flaming soon-to-be-dead survivors. However, I noticed that enemies sometimes fell down. It dawned on me that pegging them in the face with a grenade would knock them down and trap them in the blast radius. Hilariously fun. This is a combination of the Shooting and Explosives skills using lock-aim, shooting allowed me to pick a target body part and how accurate I could tthrow. I realized that though I was seeing all the skills at max level, I won't be able to combine these experiences together.
Hopefully the full version will have a story narrative and more varied missions, I haven't even seen someone get in the car with me. However, being able to play with all skills at level 4 should be fun.
The city itself seems pretty small considering how fast you can cross the entire thing. Ability orbs, footrace, vehicle race, and stunts seem to be the only things to discover.
The strong enemies lift stuff from time to time, but are only encountered at max hostility and they can't really kill you if you're not willing to die. They do too little damage, die too fast, and it's too easy for you to escape. I haven't seen anything in this demo that really poses a threat to you so far. The only danger is when you fight lots and lots of enemies in the open with rifles without trying to take cover.
I think my final judgement of this game will be completely reliant on how enjoyable the storyline missions are and how much variety they bring. If these assasinations ARE the main focus of the game, this is a definite rental.
BoyBlunder
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Nov 10, 2003
- Messages
- 1,245
great review. pretty much sums it up for me.
Anyone else having issues with the demo constantly freezing up on them?
It's kind of annoying, I don't think it's my 360 since every other game / activity runs fine for hours (just ask Saint's Row)
But in Crackdown i'll be in the middle of something, and it just freezes, not even the Dashboard button thing works.
(Though I can power cycle the console via Infrared with the remote)
Otherwise it's pretty fun, though the targeting is a bit whacky
It's kind of annoying, I don't think it's my 360 since every other game / activity runs fine for hours (just ask Saint's Row)
But in Crackdown i'll be in the middle of something, and it just freezes, not even the Dashboard button thing works.
(Though I can power cycle the console via Infrared with the remote)
Otherwise it's pretty fun, though the targeting is a bit whacky
Alright, last thoughts on the demo.
Maxed the shooting, finished some more foot races, and the assasinations, and played some co-op.
Co-op is a blast. It's basically just have another player in the game. Cars can be shared, but the passenger can't do anything but jump out. But really, we just used the car to get out of the Keep and then just jumped everywhere after that, way more fun, even if it's a little slower. Racing a friend is great fun, and must be incredibly hard if you're both melee-kicking each other off into the street while racing through the rooftops.
Targeting is slow and awkward since it's very literal with the lock-on. It will pretty much lock onto whatever is in the center of the crosshairs, rather than what you're probably trying to point to. This makes sense at first, but it does not sync with the game's vision, where it wants you to feel like a super-fast,super-human, freak of nature. The problem is due in part to the fact that you're using a controller to aim the crosshairs but really, that's a problem that has been controlled very well by other controller shooter games. Saints Row, Gears of War, Call of Duty, etc. The ability to aim with analog sticks in a game is very heavily dependent on the developer tuning of the sensitivity ranges. At the far end you turn quicker, and in progressively lower stages you turn at progressively lower speeds of acceleration. However, in Crackdown, the base speed of turning is far too slow and the acceleration rate is too high. What has worked better in other games was a medium speed base-turn, with slow acceleration and immediate max-turn rate when the stick is at the edge.
I find that it's easier at times to just not use lock-on aiming, and to just leave the crosshair at street level while using the extremely fast strafing speed to place the crosshair on the enemy. Trying to turn the crosshairs to lock-onto an enemy is slower, and can result in you targeting the car door behind him, or the car, or the trash can behind the car, or even targeting a tiny little speck of a pedestrian on a peninsula over the river hundreds of feet away that I didn't even see(I'm not joking, or exaggerating, these are all actual examples). All while I'm trying to just target the guy with the gun that just stepped out of the car 10-15 feet away. To be fair, the aiming works 95% of the time, but it's extremely jarring when the otherwise smooth and fast action is stopped because you're circle strafing a car instead of the enemy you were trying to lock-onto...then unlock and try to aim at the enemy again, but due to the slow turn rate, you end up locking again before the crosshairs make it over to the enemy...and you're circle-strafing the car again.
It might be just my imagination, or just getting used to dealing with the finicky aiming, but the turn speed improved at higher levels. Shooting generally leveled much much slower than the other skills; probably because the developers expect players to spend most of their time shooting the huge amount of criminals in the game.
However, in practice, shooting enemies is the slow way of killing them, unless they're at sniping range, and only if it's just one and you don't want to go all the way over there for just one guy. For the most part, blowing them up with the gratifying and plentiful explosives or just diving in with your insane speed and meleeing them is much faster and requires no reloading.
Precision targeting is interesting, leg shots knock an enemy down, arm shots disarm, and headshots do an instant kill. However, leg and arm shots have yet to serve a purpose since enemies die so very quickly, and headshots take awhile to lock properly. At level 4, it all pays off, and shooting becomes a viable alternative to blowing up and speed-meleeing the enemies. This game really needs to be played on the hard or hardest setting, you're far too overpowered for the normal difficulty. Actually, shooting may be balanced pretty well at the higher difficulties.
It feels like Crackdown is a mesh of /awesome/ and "meh" gameplay mechanics. I'm not sure what the point of driving and shooting is to this game. They both can be fun at times, but the show is stolen by strength, agility, and explosives. The Hulk does not need a pistol.
As I played through, in my head I'm picturing the developers adding on features to their vision of the game. It seems like they added some phenomenal aspects to the gameplay, that unfortunately went far beyond the scope of their original vision for the game. The game I think would be better if it focused on what it did well and fleshed that out, while eschewing the parts that fail to entertain. I end up enjoying the good parts while wishing that they did this or that, and wondering why they even bothered with the other parts.
I love just jumping through the city, figuring out the fastest routes to the top of each building. My god, they did an incredible job of designing this city vertically. The horizontal dimensions of this city are small like I mentioned in the previous post. However, the square foot area of this city makes it as big or bigger than the other free-roam games in this genre. When you consider all the traveling you do upwards and between buildings whereas in other games you're pretty much stuck to the streets(or in spiderman, just rooftops and streets rather than multi-level buildings).
Agility leveling is designed like indoor rock-climbing. For those who have never done this before, a strip of rock wall can actually feature a large number of paths. Most gyms will use colored tape on these paths to indicate which parts of the rock you can/should use to define the difficulty. A beginner might climb up, having to use the big fat grips, while the expert bypass these to the distant and tiny thin grips.
In Crackdown, the agility orbs have a series of smaller orbs resting above them, labeling the difficulty of the climb to get there. In numerous cases, you can find a way to reach orbs above your level(they're still the same value though). This prevents you from attempting paths too hard for your agility level. This numbered orb scheme is very similar to rock-climbing's multi-tiered difficulty over the same plot of space. The races are similar, the checkpoint spacing and layout over the cityscape make 2 races over the same neighborhood feel different depending on the agility level of the race.
I took a long time banging out my impressions bit by bit since I don't have a whole lot of time to play on a given night
But I think I finally made it through the demo, and I can't help but feel that the developers should have given more consideration to the design of the demo, because it didn't show enough teasers about how much more the full version would have. It feels like I might have already seen the most entertaining parts of this game already. Also, I think I've spent so much time noting the flaws in this game because of the broad scope of the game and the high quality in some aspects that have led me to expect similar quality across its span. I'm still going to buy this game I think.
Maxed the shooting, finished some more foot races, and the assasinations, and played some co-op.
Co-op is a blast. It's basically just have another player in the game. Cars can be shared, but the passenger can't do anything but jump out. But really, we just used the car to get out of the Keep and then just jumped everywhere after that, way more fun, even if it's a little slower. Racing a friend is great fun, and must be incredibly hard if you're both melee-kicking each other off into the street while racing through the rooftops.
Targeting is slow and awkward since it's very literal with the lock-on. It will pretty much lock onto whatever is in the center of the crosshairs, rather than what you're probably trying to point to. This makes sense at first, but it does not sync with the game's vision, where it wants you to feel like a super-fast,super-human, freak of nature. The problem is due in part to the fact that you're using a controller to aim the crosshairs but really, that's a problem that has been controlled very well by other controller shooter games. Saints Row, Gears of War, Call of Duty, etc. The ability to aim with analog sticks in a game is very heavily dependent on the developer tuning of the sensitivity ranges. At the far end you turn quicker, and in progressively lower stages you turn at progressively lower speeds of acceleration. However, in Crackdown, the base speed of turning is far too slow and the acceleration rate is too high. What has worked better in other games was a medium speed base-turn, with slow acceleration and immediate max-turn rate when the stick is at the edge.
I find that it's easier at times to just not use lock-on aiming, and to just leave the crosshair at street level while using the extremely fast strafing speed to place the crosshair on the enemy. Trying to turn the crosshairs to lock-onto an enemy is slower, and can result in you targeting the car door behind him, or the car, or the trash can behind the car, or even targeting a tiny little speck of a pedestrian on a peninsula over the river hundreds of feet away that I didn't even see(I'm not joking, or exaggerating, these are all actual examples). All while I'm trying to just target the guy with the gun that just stepped out of the car 10-15 feet away. To be fair, the aiming works 95% of the time, but it's extremely jarring when the otherwise smooth and fast action is stopped because you're circle strafing a car instead of the enemy you were trying to lock-onto...then unlock and try to aim at the enemy again, but due to the slow turn rate, you end up locking again before the crosshairs make it over to the enemy...and you're circle-strafing the car again.
It might be just my imagination, or just getting used to dealing with the finicky aiming, but the turn speed improved at higher levels. Shooting generally leveled much much slower than the other skills; probably because the developers expect players to spend most of their time shooting the huge amount of criminals in the game.
However, in practice, shooting enemies is the slow way of killing them, unless they're at sniping range, and only if it's just one and you don't want to go all the way over there for just one guy. For the most part, blowing them up with the gratifying and plentiful explosives or just diving in with your insane speed and meleeing them is much faster and requires no reloading.
Precision targeting is interesting, leg shots knock an enemy down, arm shots disarm, and headshots do an instant kill. However, leg and arm shots have yet to serve a purpose since enemies die so very quickly, and headshots take awhile to lock properly. At level 4, it all pays off, and shooting becomes a viable alternative to blowing up and speed-meleeing the enemies. This game really needs to be played on the hard or hardest setting, you're far too overpowered for the normal difficulty. Actually, shooting may be balanced pretty well at the higher difficulties.
It feels like Crackdown is a mesh of /awesome/ and "meh" gameplay mechanics. I'm not sure what the point of driving and shooting is to this game. They both can be fun at times, but the show is stolen by strength, agility, and explosives. The Hulk does not need a pistol.
As I played through, in my head I'm picturing the developers adding on features to their vision of the game. It seems like they added some phenomenal aspects to the gameplay, that unfortunately went far beyond the scope of their original vision for the game. The game I think would be better if it focused on what it did well and fleshed that out, while eschewing the parts that fail to entertain. I end up enjoying the good parts while wishing that they did this or that, and wondering why they even bothered with the other parts.
I love just jumping through the city, figuring out the fastest routes to the top of each building. My god, they did an incredible job of designing this city vertically. The horizontal dimensions of this city are small like I mentioned in the previous post. However, the square foot area of this city makes it as big or bigger than the other free-roam games in this genre. When you consider all the traveling you do upwards and between buildings whereas in other games you're pretty much stuck to the streets(or in spiderman, just rooftops and streets rather than multi-level buildings).
Agility leveling is designed like indoor rock-climbing. For those who have never done this before, a strip of rock wall can actually feature a large number of paths. Most gyms will use colored tape on these paths to indicate which parts of the rock you can/should use to define the difficulty. A beginner might climb up, having to use the big fat grips, while the expert bypass these to the distant and tiny thin grips.
In Crackdown, the agility orbs have a series of smaller orbs resting above them, labeling the difficulty of the climb to get there. In numerous cases, you can find a way to reach orbs above your level(they're still the same value though). This prevents you from attempting paths too hard for your agility level. This numbered orb scheme is very similar to rock-climbing's multi-tiered difficulty over the same plot of space. The races are similar, the checkpoint spacing and layout over the cityscape make 2 races over the same neighborhood feel different depending on the agility level of the race.
I took a long time banging out my impressions bit by bit since I don't have a whole lot of time to play on a given night
But I think I finally made it through the demo, and I can't help but feel that the developers should have given more consideration to the design of the demo, because it didn't show enough teasers about how much more the full version would have. It feels like I might have already seen the most entertaining parts of this game already. Also, I think I've spent so much time noting the flaws in this game because of the broad scope of the game and the high quality in some aspects that have led me to expect similar quality across its span. I'm still going to buy this game I think.