Once you've completed the single player campaign you have a number of options at your disposal. You can take on the time trials (which are cage match style battles that lock you in a single area to battle a specific bad guy you've already beaten in the regular game), continue playing to unlock achievements (more below), compete in all the races and stun challenges or just continue to meander around the world and killing things at your leisure. But if all that isn't enough for you, you can simply jump on Xbox Live and play some cooperative with friends. Coop works pretty well and allows both you and other players to grow your characters' skills, but only the person hosting the game gets to keep the progress made in the game world. Basically that means you're just visiting and your single-player world remains the way you left it..
The other important note about coop play in Crackdown is that the term cooperative can be used loosely. In the game you can, if you so choose to, hurt the other player. This can of course lead to some abuse should the wrong personality types get together,, but players can also use this to have some fun beating the holy hell out of each other without any repercussions. This can lead to some great combat involving Matrix style gun-and-jump battles, car tossing and lots of wild and crazy explosive battles. Multiplayer is sand-box at its core and lots of fun no matter how you want to play it.
The art style in the game is very unique, combining cell-shaded characters and objects with a nice 3D world that meshes together to create a crisp futuristic urban game world. The worlds are heavily populated with plenty of personalities that have a range of good and bad things to say to you. Crackdown looks as good as Lost Planet or Saint's Row - and much like the latter, provides and urban playground of destruction where big explosions and crazy physics come together to create a symphony of utter destruction.
Finally Crackdown has a ton of achievements to keep you busy well after you've completed the single player game. There are 48 achievements and only a handful are truly tied to the main storyline. Sure there are some tied to killing off each gang, but there are also achievements for finding all the game's hidden items, driving skills and racing and doing stunts involving driving and explosives. There's a good mix of things to accomplish - some mundane and some complicated - but all fun.
Crackdown does everything right and doesn't let the narrative (which assails you at every turn) get in the way of the fun - and there's plenty of fun to be had. On the lowest difficulty level gamers should be able to plow through the single-player campaign in around 10 - 12 hours. But if you add all the extras like multiplayer, tons of achievements, and all the races and hidden goodies, then Crackdown will keep you busy for a hell of a lot longer. If you're looking for something like GTA or Saint's Row, but with a different pacing , then Crackdown is your ticket to ride..
