This review of Crackdown 2 will be short because Crackdown 2 is not good enough to warrant an in depth review.  Long story short, if you are thinking about playing Crackdown 2 you should definitely rent it before you spend sixty of your hard earned dollars buying it.  I honestly can’t even recommend spending ten of your hard earned dollars renting Crackdown 2.  Maybe if you have a Gamefly account and nothing else in your queue you should try out Crackdown 2, but you would be better off just playing Crackdown again because Crackdown 2 is just a lazy remake of Crackdown that is worse than the original.  Lets just do a quick rundown of the controls, graphics, game play and character and call it a day.  There is no point in talking about Crackdown 2′s story because there is no story.

In Crackdown 2 you get to play as an Agent of the Agency again.  The Agent is a nameless, faceless silent mook that engenders about as much sympathy as a gun toting brick.  Character customization is a joke.  You can give your Agent one of four or five butt ugly pre-made faces but there is no point because after you get your first level in your first skill your Agent gets fitted out with a helmet.  The only other nod to character customization is that you can pick a color for your Agent’s armor.  Their is little point to choosing a color of your armor because you can choose from about four different colors ranging from blue to gray and they are all samey and boring.  That is the extent of character customization.  Character customization is like a vestigial feature that got carried over from Crackdown but Crackdown 2 barely has enough customization options to make the claim that it has character customization.  The result feels lazy and pointless.  The story in Crackdown 2 has the same lazy, pointless feeling.

Crackdown 2  is a sandbox action game where you are tasked with clearing a terrorist group and a mutant zombie horde out of Pacific City.  The only reason there is a terrorist group or a mutant zombie horde in Crackdown 2 is because Crackdown 2 can’t really have a game without bad guys.  The in game explanation for why the bad guys even exist is brief and quickly forgotten.  The only thing you need to know about the terrorists is that they are called The Cell and they have some strongholds that you need go shoot up.  The only thing you need to know about the mutant zombie horde is that they are called The Freaks and they have some holes in the ground that you need to drop bombs in.  That is all there is to Crackdown 2.  After you shoot up you first stronghold and bomb you first hole in the ground all there is to do is lather, rinse, and repeat until all the strongholds are shot up and all the holes are bombed.  Or in my case you just shoot up a few strongholds and bomb a few holes in the ground until you get bored and go play something else.  In a nutshell, the game play is fun for the first few hours but it quickly gets boring.  The only thing that gets boring faster than the core game play is the graphics.

Crackdown 2′s graphics looks good but it is like a good looking bowl of fruit.  It is nothing you have not seen before and it gets old pretty quickly.  Crackdown 2 shamelessly reuses the same city from the original Crackdown.  The only change is that Crackdown 2 has made the city a little more drab and added a bit of rubble.  The enemies are the same drab, gray chumps from the beginning of the game to the end.  At least they were the same sorry bastards when I quit playing and I only had about three more strongholds to shoot up and two more holes in the ground to bomb when I quit.  The only things to look at in Pacific City other than the boring Cell and Freaks are the civilians and the police.  The civilians are vaguely annoying non-entities that occasionally get run over.  The police are bland, blue annoying chumps that will shoot at you after you accidentally run over a few pedestrians.  That is all there is to look at in Crackdown 2 so all of the modern graphics rendered in their HD glory that Crackdown 2 offers are wasted on bland, drab, and boring things.  Crackdown 2′s controls are a lot like Pacific City itself.  Both Crackdown 2′s controls and Pacific city are a direct port from the original Crackdown.

Crackdown 2′s controls and play style is exactly the same as the original Crackdown.  Crackdown 2 does not bother to fix the auto targeting system that likes to aim at innocent vehicles instead of the thugs with rocket launchers that just got out the innocent vehicle.  Every other thing you liked or hated about the original Crackdown’s controls are in Crackdown 2 in all their glory.  The driving controls are, not surprisingly, an exact port from the original.  The only difference is that the cars in Crackdown 2 do not transform or do anything interesting like they did in the original Crackdown.  In fact, everything else about the game play in Crackdown 2 is like the original Crackdown but less interesting.  That Crackdown 2 is like the original but less interesting is about the best summary that will ever be said about Crackdown 2 so lets put this review to bed and get on with our lives.

Crackdown 2 is an extremely lazy remake of the original Crackdown that is not worth playing.  Crackdown 2 could have been good if it had taken the original game and improved on it but Crackdown 2 actually took the original Crackdown and made it worse.  I only played Crackdown 2 because my roommate bought it and he only bought it because he was hoping that Crackdown 2 would be better than the original.  It turns out that my roommate needs to do a little more research before he drops sixty bucks on a game with only the hope that it will be good.  In the end, the only thing left to say about Crackdown 2 is that my roommate is planning to sell his copy to Gamestop the next time he goes there.