I've always wondered where the term 'sandbox game' came about. Sure, when we were kids playing in our sand pits, our imaginations were free to do anything we liked, the sand could be the deserts of Africa, the beach or anything else that our overactive brains could conjure. Now instead of pushing matchbox cars around outside in the fresh air we sit inside glued to increasingly large televisions driving virtual cars inside the creation of someone else's imagination.

That's why for me the 'sandbox game' has always been somewhat of an overstatement. Sure in games such as GTA, Saints Row and now Crackdown you're given free reign to run around in ever increasingly and detailed worlds but the amount of stuff you can do is limited by what either the developers want you to be able to do, or what the time constraints of their development time and budget allowed them to include. Unfortunately, with the exception of Saints Row, the number of unique and new things you're able to do in these games seems to have hit a brick wall and while Crackdown is great fun with RPG style abilities that upgrade as you play, has heaps of massive explosions, cool weapons and loads of action, it feels like there's some of the game missing and there's only a few things that it adds to the genre. Luckily it's heaps of fun, and I mean it, because while it would be an easy game to constantly criticise, Crackdown has a unique style and is great fun to play through.

Set on the crime filled streets of Pacific City, Crackdown throws you into the boots of a law enforcement agent whose job it is to take down the 3 gangs that each rule separate parts of this sprawling metropolis. The Los Muertos, The Volk and the Shai Gen each control a separate island that they have heavily defended and rule with an iron fist. Each section has its own look with the Los Muertos section appearing just like many American cities but the Volk section has a distinctly Russian industrial feel while the Shai Gen's area features more modern high-rise sky scrapers and Asian themes. So while Saints Row also had quite a large map, Crackdown actually felt larger to me because of these differences between each section.

Luckily for you, you're not just some ordinary, run-of-the-mill police officer, but a genetically modified clone whose abilities increase the more that you use them. Fresh out of the test tube you have more strength, can jump higher and run faster than the average beat cop, but Crackdown features an 'RPG-Lite' experience which sees you enhance these abilities the more that you use them. Shoot baddies and your gun skills increase, or if you want your strength to rise, give them a nice flying kick instead. If you want your explosive skill to increase, take them down with grenades (and later on, rocket launchers). It's a simple system but one that is pretty addictive and the addition of hundreds of Agility Orbs scattered around the map that increase your agility (no surprise there) make it even more so.

There were times playing Crackdown that I would just spend an hour trying to find them instead of actually going after the crims because the more that you collect, the higher and further you can jump and leaping between skyscrapers is one of the genuinely addictive parts of the game. I can honestly say that there haven't been many games I've played that gave me a feeling of vertigo like this one did. Climbing to the tops of some of the higher buildings and then leaping from rooftop to rooftop collecting orbs was something I didn't think would be as addictive as it actually was, and you really do feel like the Six Million Dollar man or whatever other cool super hero you imagined yourself as when you were young.

As mentioned, each part of Pacific City features a distinct style and the graphics themselves while using the 'cel shaded' style of graphics, actually contain a lot more detail than I was expecting to see. The characters are intricately realised when you see them up close and the buildings are also quite varied and feature heaps of individual details. The draw distance in Crackdown has to be mentioned as it's absolutely breath taking. Climb to the top of any skyscraper in the game and you can pretty much see from one end of the game to the other with no annoying fog! Littering the city streets are countless civilians and traffic and while the numbers on screen are high, they repeat themselves quite a bit and have a bad habit of really just getting in your way, especially during the car race activities. Next to the extreme draw distance, the other major graphical highlight are the immense explosions that while, initially, may not appear anything special, once your Explosive Ability is upgraded they get more and more spectacular as the game progresses.

Also due to the open-ended style of the game you're free to enjoy building stacks of cars which you then stick heaps of limpet mines onto for some massive carnage, or see how many cars you can throw onto a roof of one of the buildings and then shoot a couple of rockets into them so you can watch all the shrapnel rain down onto the people in the streets. It's this part of the game that offers up the most fun because the story is almost non existent, so with a lack of a solid narrative, you've got to keep yourself amused another way. I'm not saying there's no story, but it's pretty thin.

Basically your job is to explore the city, track down the criminal bosses, take them out, then kill their big boss and then finish off any stragglers that meet up for one last attack. Multiply this by 3 and you essentially have Crackdown's main 'quest' in a nutshell, but as mentioned there's loads of exploring and distractions to keep you occupied along the way. As you explore and track the bosses down you receive Intel from your HQ that gives you a run down via a cut scene of the sort of naughty things each one is getting up to and once their dead, you get another cut scene congratulating you and updating you on the impact their demise will have, repeat this for each boss and you have Crackdowns' narrative.. there's no in depth look at the morals of cloning or creating super humans and no twists in the story line.

I actually recommend not rushing through and taking the time to find the Agility and Hidden Orbs, pick up heaps of enemy weapons to stash in your Agency Supply Points and increase your abilities on the common street thugs as much as possible as this is where the bulk of the fun is to be had and you could very well run the risk of finishing the main game before gaining the achievements earnt from maxing out your abilities. Thankfully even after finishing off all the bosses, you're able to keep going with a nice option that lets you turn criminals on and off. This was pretty cool to find because if you just want to find all the orbs, turn off the criminals and go for it or if you didn't max up all your abilities, turn them on, pack your rocket launcher and continue paving the streets with dead bad guys.

The Agency Supply points form a key tactic in your fight to take back the streets. The majority of them are in the hands of the enemy and have to be taken back. Once you do you're able to use them to travel around the map instantly, recover health, stash weapons you pick up and after you die, give you a spawn point instead of having to jump or drive all the way back to where you were... very handy. Unlike Saints Row the Supply points and parts of Pacific City that you liberate are never taken back and once reclaimed, are yours for good. Things do pick up while you're waging your one man war and as you're busy taking down foot soldiers they'll try to fight back by sending out hit-squads in vehicles and when that happens, things get crazy real fast and quite often you'll need to retreat and rearm. A few resurgences from some of the bad guys after you've cleaned each area though wouldn't have hurt, and may have added a bit of extra game time, but if you didn't like that in Saints Row then you'll be happy anyway and it may have probably just made Crackdown too repetitive.

A cool feature in Crackdown to help you take the baddies out is the targeting system. Yeah it has one issue where it continues to target baddies, even after they're dead, but 99% of the time it does a solid job and with a flick of the R analog stick, even lets you target different areas on peoples bodies and different parts of cars. You can shoot baddies in the arms to make them drop weapons, in the leg to drop them to the ground, in the chest or go for the headshot, which takes longer to line up. When aiming at cars you can aim at the fuel tank and watch it go up in a satisfying explosion, or aim at the tyres to watch the driver lose control. In fact, standing on the side of the freeway in Crackdown shooting out the tyres of passing cars and trucks and causing massive pile ups is all part of the fun and good for a distraction between taking down the bosses. I particularly liked targeting the baddies then running towards them and kicking them off the rooftops to watch them tumble to the ground 15 stories down...nice and sadistic!

There is plenty on offer and lots to like in Crackdown as its loads of fun, but the sandbox format does work against the game in a number of ways. Many of the bosses can be taken out simply by sneaking or swimming around part of the map or jumping over their hired goons and putting a couple of rockets into them which makes the boss fights easier than perhaps they should have been. The biggest challenge generally comes from the nasty groups of dudes with the homing missiles rather than the boss fights themselves and this is entirely due to the fact that you're a super human experiment that can simply bypass parts of the map in a single jump.

Honestly I can't think of a better way it could have been handled though that wouldn't have hurt the game so having the levels totally open works so much in Crackdown's favour that you can overlook this one concern and it feels kind of weird complaining about too much "sand in the sandbox”.

One of the biggest features on offer that I'm keen to try out is the online co-operative action. In the demo it was absolutely mental and should be very popular on Xbox Live. I've yet to try it out though as nobody on my friends list has the game yet but I will definitely be hosting some games! There's a patch due out with the games release that takes care of some of the lag issues being reported but also apparently joining co-op games is sounding less smooth than it should be with the map needing to reload once a friend joins in. Hopefully that can be looked at as well because it sounds fairly annoying and the lure of jumping rooftop to rooftop and wreaking immense havoc on the streets of Pacific City with a mate sounds too good to miss out on!