YMMV / Crackdown

• Audience-Alienating Premise: A big reason for the failure of Crackdown 2 - you're fighting for a totalitarian regime, and you know it this time. And no, there's no Heel–Face Turn, the Player Character remains loyal to the Agency until the end.
• Awesome Music: Lots. Just listen to the main theme!
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Terry Crews, on the basis of the E3 2017 trailer alone. One YouTube commenter asked, "Why isn't Terry Crews in every video game trailer?"
• First Installment Wins: The first Crackdown was a surprise hit, and still well liked to this day. 2 and 3 are both considered subpar at best. They were essentially stripped down versions of the original without what made it fun, with 3 in particular lambasted for its poor technical performance.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The game was directed by one of the original creators of Grand Theft Auto, David Jones. The developer of the second and some of the third installments ended up actually getting acquired by Jones' former company, Rockstar Games, now doing business as "Rockstar Dundee" (formerly Ruffian Games Limited).
• It Was His Sled: Most people who know about the series are aware of the fact that The Agency and The Director are Evil All Along, and that The Bad Guy Wins because of you.
• Memetic Mutation. "Skills for kills, agent. Skills for kills." It's the most popular of the lines in the first game, and it gets a Call-Back in 3.
• Moral Event Horizon: While many characters end up crossing the line, none go further than Catalina Thorne - at least, according to the Agency's propaganda, which is actually completely false. Collecting all the audio logs reveals that Catalina is actually one of the most outright heroic characters in the series thus far.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The sweet sound of touching an orb.
• Once Original, Now Common: With the first two games being free-to-play on Xbox nowadays, it's easy to come up to Crackdown to see what all the hype is about and realize that virtually every open-world sandbox action shooter since then has either copied its formula to a tee, or improved and iterated upon it, most notably Saints Row IV all but making homage to its mobility and orb collecting. The game was a great showcase of the Xbox 360's hardware for the time, and the leap in the scale and chaos that such games could make in the then-new generation, but now it's been done so many times that its own third sequel was met with mediocre reviews when it ended up taking absolutely no innovations over the nine years since the second.
• Preview Piggybacking: It was nice of Microsoft to package a free game with the Halo 3 multiplayer beta.
• Sequelitis: Crackdown 2 was nearly identical to its predecessor, but it left out a few tiny details that are missed. The city is less-pretty now due to damage and a different rendering engine. There are no briefing videos on local targets in the area. Agency vehicles also no longer transform when you get into them. Changes like these are felt to have made the whole experience a lesser game.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: You're out to clean up the city, but you're first going to spend a long time leaping around looking for green orbs.
  • Hop into the back of a pickup truck as it begins to cross a bridge. Shoot the tires out of passing vehicles with a sniper rifle, trying to get them to swerve off the side of the bridge. When the pickup reaches the end of the bridge, hop out and catch a truck heading in the opposite direction. Repeat until out of ammo.
  • Many players enjoyed seeing how many cars they could stack before making them all explode in one glorious nuclear-level blast.
• That One Sidequest: Races are incredibly difficult if one attempts to do them before leveling up driving skill. Poor handling can result in players crashing a lot and hitting pedestrians, which will lower the skills points obtained so far.

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