Crackdown 2

The game also offers a 16-man PVP multiplayer, which will be music to the ears of anyone who ever kicked a mate off the top of the Agency tower in the first game. Every aspect of Crackdown 2 is geared towards dishing out damage and granting as much freedom as possible to the player.

Pacific City is an open-world playground in the truest sense and Ruffian Games' stated aim is that as little as possible should impeded the player's enjoyment of it. It's a testament, then, to the developers that Crackdown 2 manages to accomplish this while fleshing out both the game's paper-thin story and its formerly non-existent mission structure.

Indeed, although at a cursory glance it would seem Crackdown 2 has simply updated Crackdown's driving premise of "kill all baddies" to "kill all baddies and freaks", the main objective of the game is to assemble a giant UV weapon to reduce all the city's freaks to ash piles.

To this end, players need to secure Strongholds, reactivate radar dishes held by The Cell and then infiltrate the freak hives. Once this is done, the Agency drops a UV bomb into the hive and the player needs to defend it against the hordes of freaks who will swarm towards it. The UV shotgun comes in very handy in these crescendo events, though players are advised to be significantly levelled-up and armed to the teeth before raiding a hive.

While the hive battles give the game more structure, Ruffian has added a couple more aspects to give the plot more ballast. First there's The Cell; the Agency Director's commands are filled with venom when the player lays into these terrorists, but they'll also hear The Cell's leadership criticising the Agency's scorched-earth policy on speakers throughout the city.

While a lot of it can be dismissed as standard pleading and threatening, players do get the creeping sensation from the odd comment that there's more going than the Director's letting them know about. And then there's a enigmatic weirdo who is studying the freaks and leaving his findings on audio diaries throughout the city.

It's too early to say whether these aspects are simply there for atmosphere, or whether they'll prove important later in the game. Whatever the case, there's more going on in Crackdown 2 plot-wise than in its predecessor.

What makes it all the more compelling is that the plot doesn't impinge on the player's enjoyment. Whether you care about the world-building or not doesn't matter, as the chaotic Crackdown gameplay and its joyous sense of freedom is still present and correct. It's just impressive that a game that looks this barmy can be so subversive at the same time.