Crack's in the Title for a Reason

Look, I'm going to be honest with you: I hate zombie movies, and I'm not too fond of zombie games, either. At best, they're uninteresting; at worst, they're just plain lazy, substituting a crush of undead bodies for worthier opponents. On the other hand, I love Crackdown, 2007's surprise masterpiece for Xbox 360. So, needless to say, the fact that Crackdown 2 takes the series into zombie territory leaves me feeling awfully conflicted.

Fortunately, going on what developer Ruffian has shown of the game (both in a surprise debut at last year's Tokyo Game Show and this week at Microsoft's X10 event), I'm definitely falling on the optimistic side of conflicted. While Crackdown 2's campaign isn't playable yet, the 20-minute walkthrough on display today for the press instills a sense of confidence. Ruffian fully understands the appeal of Crackdown -- namely, the ability to wreak insane havoc in a massive metropolitan sandbox full of explodey things while occasionally working toward an ultimate end goal -- and the zombies stand as an addition to the core mayhem rather than as a replacement for meatier material.

In fact, the slavering hordes may well end up resolving some of the first game's shortcomings. Empowering as it was to play a skyscraper-climbing superman, the bad guys in Crackdown honestly weren't properly up to the challenge of being worthy adversaries. With the sequel's zombies, however, you'll now be faced with enemies who can easily keep pace with your Agent, leaping after you in order to stay in the fight. And your driving skill, which was fairly difficult to level up in the first game, should be a piece of cake to improve: The roads are glutted with shambling monstrosities that your vehicles can make short work of. Zombies usually provide tension or targets in a game; here they're both.

But it's important to note that Crackdown 2 isn't all about shooting zombies in their stupid, festering faces. It is about that to a certain degree, sure, but they're not the only danger in Pacific City. (In fact, they're only a danger at night.) After the events of the original game, portions of the city fell prey to the bioweapon being developed by the Shai-Gen corporation. Keen-eyed players surely noticed that many of the enemies throughout the latter portions of the game weren't quite human, and with the fall of Shai-Gen, their experiments raged out of control. Much of Pacific City fell to the undead, but various gangs and factions retain a grip on certain strongholds -- areas locked down and free from zombie infestations, but not precisely friends to the Agency that rules the city with such loving fascism.

And so the player's mission is to free Pacific City from the zombie hordes by completing Project Sunburst, a super-weapon capable of disintegrating them. The key components necessary to build the bomb are in the possession of various gangs, so the goal is to liberate the components by seizing gang territory. Producer James Cope describes this as "a main artery running throughout the game," and that there's a more centralized feel to progress than "just killing 20 bosses." That being said, he's quick to assure us that Crackdown 2 is no more linear than its predecessor. The artery is more of an interconnected web of objectives, and it's possible to complete them in roughly any order.

By way of example, Cope demonstrated an early mission in which the Agent infiltrated an area held by a gang called The Cell. The combat here looked remarkably similar to that of the original Crackdown, with the ability to swap weapons and target specific body parts. When the area was cleared of Cell members, a team of peacekeepers descended via helicopter, securing the area to become Agency territory. This isn't entirely different from the waypoints that had to be wrested from gangs in the first game, but Cope says there's much more to the process this time. The game is about claiming territory and taking back Pacific City, though fortunately it won't involve anything like the tiresome gang wars of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas; once a piece of land is claimed, it stays claimed. As before, players can use these safe grounds to swap or restock weapons and gear. However, it's also possible now to claim Agency vehicles from these depots, saving players the trouble of returning to the Agency Tower to get the cool cars.

And cool helicopters! New to Crackdown 2 is the ability to take to the skies -- and, if you're playing co-op, to bring along a friend to hang from the chopper's skids and snipe bad guys below. Also new are special armor suits; Cope showed off something called the Wind Suit, which allows players to subvert a high-altitude fall into something useful rather than fatal. The Wind Suit's purpose bears a remarkable similarity to the flight ability from Super Mario 64, letting you use updrafts to fly upward and forward. Actually, the feather from Super Mario World might be a better comparison, since the Wind Suit also lets you focus the kinetic energy of your fall into a massive, explosive ground-pound move that can disintegrate every zombie within a sizable radius.

Pacific City itself is a mix of old and new, with familiar areas reworked in interesting ways: Shai-Gen's tower (home of the enigmatic Wang) is a devastated ruin, but for every landmark devastated in the wake of the first game, a new skyscraper has risen to take its place. The city is vast as ever but looks much more detailed this time around, and the addition of the zombie faction makes the world even more animated and manic than before. Weapons are incredibly over-the-top, and the Agent is still a superman capable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound (or at least, leaping onto them). Crackdown 2 retains its odd mix of comic book realism and super-saturated color. It's not a pretty game, exactly, but it's great fun to look at. And really, fun is the point of Crackdown.

My only disappointment with the game at the moment is that it's not readily playable (despite our hands-on time with the multiplayer mode at TGS). Happily, Ruffian's representatives promise the game will be on display for everyone to try next month at PAX East. Needless to say, we'll be reporting back with our hands-on impressions.

Originally published on 1UP.