I have, over the past week, played an absurd amount of the near final code for Crackdown on my Xbox 360 debug unit.

While it's not that surprising that a guy who writes about video games for a living is staying up till 2 a.m., 3 a.m. to play a game, what is surprising is that until I got my hands on the game I was absolutely sure it was going to suck.

Everything I'd read and seen about the game, yes even those trailers, made me think crap Grand Theft Auto knock-off, or worse still, crap 20 to Life knock-off.

But what I didn't take into account, didn't realize, was that at some point I would be able to level up my character's strength so much that he would be able to jump from a high rise onto a moving car, hop down, lift it over his head (with a driver inside) and toss it at a gun-toting thug, crushing the criminal instantly.

Yeah, you can do that.

The one thing this gaming is missing is any sort of versus multiplayer gaming. Sure you can coop with someone through the game using Live, or in-room, but I wanted to toss cars at other people on my friends list. I wanted to drop on their heads from hundreds of feet up. I wanted to air juggling them with a rocket launcher.

Despite a Microsoft rep volunteering to coop with me through parts of the game, I haven't yet had a chance to check that out. I've been too busy bounding from rooftop to rooftop.

So far I've taken out four to five of the various gang bosses, leveled up all of my skills but driving (who the hell wants to drive when you can leap from building to building.)

I've also done a fair amount of exploring.

What I like about the game is its immense open-endedness, its intertwined plots, its leveling-up. Actually, the leveling-up is what I like best.

When you start out you can barely jump up enough to grab the edge of a roof while standing on a dumpster. You can barely chuck trash cans and containers. But as you practice these "skills" your boost them and when you level up, your guy erupts into explosions of glowing blue light.

Each level up comes with a pretty hefty increase in that ability. Soon you'll find yourself running and leaping from rooftop to rooftop, plummeting down from buildings to land next to a bad guy, crushing the roadway, and then kicking the man across the street, instantly killing him.

Whats so fun about the game isn't that you have these super powers, it's that you earn them. There's something very satisfying in slowing building up a character's strength and seeing the direct impact. None of this damage bonus, no, you go from lifting trash cans to throwing cars.

While I really like the game, there are some issues. Most noticeable is the abundance of strange clipping and collision problems.

It doesn't take much to find yourself falling through or under the game's graphics, which is really unfortunate. Once, I spent a good half hour polishing off all of the gun-toting bad guys crammed into the lobby of an office building, only to have kill myself off after falling through the floor of the elevator while riding it up to the top to take on a boss.

Don't get me wrong, the game is a blast, and the persistent leveling of specific skills really makes this game, but I hope to god they do some work to polish it. To be fair I don't have the final build, so perhaps some of these issues have already been fixed.

I'm expecting the gold in the next day or two, so I'll let you know. Brian Crecente

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