Mastering your Agent’s abilities (which now includes a tricky but rewarding ‘wingsuit’) requires practice and persistence, both factors that the game eagerly accommodates. While haphazardly wandering around the map collecting orbs can be very rewarding (both in terms of increasing your stats and in pure gameplay terms), to make a real dent in the Cell/Freak forces requires a more tactical and structured approach, and it often helps to have three Agents by your side. It is in the tension between these two elements that the game’s genius lies; you can spend a whole lot of time doing nothing, simply relishing in your role as a superhero, or you can get down to dealing with the task in hand.

Despite the plethora of objectives and collect quests that the game lays at your feet, there’s no denying that Crackdown 2 can feel like a bit of a slog at times. Without a strong narrative thread to tug you onwards, it relies on the enthusiasm of the player and the hope that it’s throwing enough rewards your way to keep you playing. On the whole, Ruffian Games get the balance about right, though we can’t help but think that it might have benefitted from a slightly more focussed sense of purpose.

While we can forgive Crackdown 2 for not going to far out of it’s way to expand on the original – as the saying goes ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ – we’re less forgiving of the fact that some of the more wonky aspects of the last outing have made it into the sequel. Most prevalent is the inconsistency in parts of the city you can and cannot grab hold of; at times it feels like a complete lottery, with some windows acting as handholds and others not. The targeting system is also not the most robust, regularly refusing to lock on to your intended target, while melee combat is serviceable at best.

Navigating around Pacific City is also not as effortless as we would have liked. For example, there is no way to place way-points, a problem which is exasperated in co-op by the fact that all online players appear as grey arrows on the map, resulting in players literally having to explain where they are. It’s disappointing to find these issues in a game that is generally polished.

Presentation wise, Crackdown 2 doesn’t really do that much to build on the original. While by no means an ugly game, up close it struggles to stand shoulder to shoulder with other recent sandboxes, such as Infamous or Grand Theft Auto IV. In fairness, everything has a pleasing solidity to it and from a distance Pacific City can look almost spectacular. Additionally, equally solid sound effects serve to emphasise the physicality of your movements around the city.

There’s much we haven’t touched on this review (such as the car and rooftop races, the competitive modes, the hilarious boisterousness that can ensue when playing friends, the massively irritating announcer, the choppers and the hidden beach balls) and this fact is a testament to the amount of content that Ruffian have managed to stuff into the game. Yet despite this, and despite it being a blast to play, we can’t help but feel that Crackdown 2 doesn’t quite achieve the greatness that fans of the original were no doubt hoping for. It certainly retains a degree of uniqueness, but after playing the sublime Infamous (which delivered a similarly well stocked playground while still managing to produce an engaging narrative), Crackdown 2 can’t help but feel a little outdated. Pacific City is a great place to visit, and life as an Agent can be a (literal) riot; but when you find yourself wondering if you could be doing (or, indeed playing) something a little more productive, it becomes clear that Ruffian Games haven’t quite delivered a complete package.

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