Crackdown 2 is the sequel to Ruffian and Microsoft’s third-person action adventure. It’s a large meandering and poorly focused story. In fact, I’m not sure there’s even a story at all aside from the background. After you’re initial training mission you’re simply thrown into the deep end with little guidance. Once you start making some headway on some missions more and more options will become available to you. But with your only Agency contact being an overly annoying and derisive handler, you’re not really compelled to make more headway for them.

In the game you take on the role of an agent who works for the Agency (yes, all very creative I know). You have to wipe out the Freak Virus, destroy the Cell (resistance fighters) and do other menial tasks. There’s a stronghold system in place where centers of Cell activity are and have forced dug in. You need to go, claim the territory and destroy the opposition before the Agency can airdrop a number of their seemingly endless supply of Peacekeepers (standard infantry troops). Why they don’t just send in mass amounts of them instead of you is beyond me. I guess, because if they did that, there would be no game to play.

As with many third-person games, the camera is remarkably troublesome. Often it will spin and you will face yourself. Not very handy for aiming or completing some task. Sometimes it just gets lost altogether and all you see is the wall or the inside of some structure that you are standing close to. It happens so often that I’ve actually remarked to myself on it several time, with vulgarity-laden sentences no less. Considering that the game is rated 18+ by PEGI my choice of wording is quite appropriate. Although, I can’t really understand why the game is rated so high. Sure, there’s lots of violence and death, but thanks to the third-person camera you’re generally so far away from it that on a standard-sized television it just looks like cartoons.

When you first enter the game, either in single or multiplayer, you are given the most basic of customization options for your agent which includes one of four colors for uniform - all of which are uninteresting - and for single player, some choice of head, from a standard set of also, generally uninteresting heads. It’s almost like right before the game went out the door they said "Oh! Hey, we forgot to give the players any kind of customization," and in reply someone said, "bah, they don’t really want that!" and they just threw this in to compromise.