A bonus you'll discover from leaping to and fro is the amazing draw distance. Climb to the top of the agency tower, an action which will garner you one or two achievements if you're slick, and you can look out over the entire city. Though the crisp comic book art style of the characters does not extend to the vistas, the somewhat soft backdrops look their best from on high.
The graphics range from fun to plain, with character models being highly stylized and reminiscent of comic book art. While the city design isn't so bad, it lacks some of the crisp edges of the characters. Overall, I doubt you'll complain about the graphics, but it doesn't break new ground.
As you look out across the land, you may not realize a huge feature of Crackdown. The game's developers have freed you from load times. The full map loads all at once, giving you a streaming world that you can travel across at will. No more "damaged bridges" or load screens standing between you and the other islands.
The open map can make for a very strange, if liberating, coop mode. Coop play in the demo is much more of a buddy flick experience because the single island keeps you close to each other. With the full map at your disposal, I found coop more of a chat room than anything. My partners, perhaps turned off by my orb obsession, always ended up on the other end of the map. Working together can uncover some new gameplay elements - try tossing your partner and his car to the top of a building to help them win some driving achievements - but the map doesn't necessarily encourage this.
On the topic of maps, Crackdown fails to offer the kinds of improvements Saints Row brought to the sandbox genre. There are no way points, no custom map markers and you may have a tough time finding racing and agility missions if you don't remember where they were. This may not be all bad, considering that the races can be punishing and unbearable, depending on how you have decided to progress within the game. Anything less than a 2 star driving rating will make failed races the norm. Races can last as long as 10 or 15 minutes, and one bad spill at the 9 minute mark could ruin your entire effort.
Right now you have three gangs, each more difficult to tackle than the previous. Los Muertos, The Volk and Shai-Gen each have seven bosses you need to kill, with one mega-boss apiece. The boss battles are the least satisfying of the game, with the boss AI causing them to stand in one place and shout at you while occasionally firing a rocket at you. The average gang enemy is usually tougher and the sheer weight of the boss bodyguards tends to offer the biggest challenge. Even then, if you slip in and out of a boss mission, you can kill the big guy without suffering too much for it.
Gang hit squads will occasionally pop up to punish you for enforcing the law a little to harshly. These baddies are some of the toughest of the entire game, but if you remember to take cover to recover your health and shield, even they aren't impossible to dispatch. The artificial intelligence of the game doesn't ever try to outthink you, they settle for outnumbering you.
You'll never be outgunned, since every gang weapon is available for your use, including the unbalanced mega-weapon rocket launcher. That tool might as well be called the "street sweeper". You capture enemy weapons by picking one up from a fallen bad guy and racing back to an Agency supply point to automatically store it. The supply points also act as teleportation machines, making the map easier to manage.
