Crack Down - SEGA - 1990 - First time playing?: Yes!

Crack Down is… fine, I guess. It's one of those kinds of games. Hard to muster any emotion positive or negative over. It’s got some interesting ideas, but doesn’t do enough with them to be too exciting. I have very little positive to say about it but in spite of that I don't even think this is an awful game. It's right in that level of inoffensively substandard where the worst you can say is that it's boringly mediocre. Even editing this page was boring. I took 332 screenshots while playing this game, and having to sift through them all deciding which ones looked most exciting and relevant to what I'm talking about, in spite of the fact that they all consist of a tiny little dude shooting other tiny little dudes in a small window in the bottom left corner of the screen? Not the most thrilling experience.

You play as a tiny beefy muscle dude and you need to kill a mad scientist who is creating artificial life forms to take over the world with. Going through a series of 16 top-down facilities, you need to plant time bombs at every spot of the map marked with a red X and then escape the level before the whole place blows up with you in it. You have three weapons each with their own ammo pools. There's the machine gun which functions more like a pistol due to the slower fire rate and is pretty weak, there's the cannon which fires much stronger rockets that pierce through enemies, and finally there's the bombs which are your regular screen clearing bombs which will instantly kill every enemy on screen. You can also punch and kick enemies so hard that they explode, done by pressing the fire button when you're in melee range. There's also a sidle mechanic, where by pressing up against a wall you can lay against it to step out of the way of incoming bullets, useful in tight corridors.

Gain Ground is probably the closest comparison I could make to Crack Down, in that it’s a top-down run & gun with a more strategic angle since movement is slow and you’re encouraged to be more cautious in your approach. In fact, this game made me think about Gain Ground so much that I kept getting the two mixed up while writing this review. There's maybe also a bit of Bonanza Brothers in here, in how the game has a split screen UI and is focused on reaching specific marked points on a map and then escaping before time runs out. Unfortunately I don't think it's quite as good as either of those games, it lacks the variety and strategy of Gain Ground and lacks the fun AI manipulation and stealth mechanics of Bonanza Brothers. Crack Down has the sidle mechanic (which is also similar to Bonanza Brothers) but that's kind of all it has beyond the most basic enemy shooting.

In spite of what a simple game it is both visually and mechanically, the Mega Drive also struggles immensely with running it. This is a game where having a single enemy on screen is enough to cause the game to slow down, and it only gets worse the larger the hordes get. It's extremely rare for the game to ever run at full speed, especially since enemies respawn infinitely almost immediately after killing them. The few instances where the game runs at full speed are so infrequent and jarring that it's common for me to immediately run straight into a bottomless pit since I'm moving so much faster than I even knew my character could run.

This game also has a tendency to throw platformer-esque hazards at you, which require a surprising amount of finesse to get through. By the second half of the game, the designers delighted in throwing mazes with electrified walls, moving platforms, conveyor belts and sparking electrical wires which are all significantly harder to navigate than they look. The hitbox ambiguity doesn't help either. I think the hitbox is primarily located around the shadow of the player character, but even then I'm not sure. Other times I've just had instances of my character falling through the floor next to a pit. It's hard not to feel cheated when you see your sprite going through the falling death animation entirely on solid ground.

So the game sounds pretty hard, right? Actually, not really. I played on the default difficulty settings and still managed to beat the game on my third try, and the game is only about 30 minutes long so you never lose much progress. The game starts you with five lives and gives you plentiful extra lives as you play as well. Run out of lives? No problem, you still have four more continues to beat the game with after that, each of which lets you carry on with five more lives and four more bombs. By the time I finally made it to the final level I had so many lives stocked up that I could just brute force my way through the level by running head first into every hazard thrown my way. Yeah, you die in one hit, but you also respawn in the exact same spot you died in immediately afterwards and with temporary invincibility, just allowing you to carry on. The final boss is extremely underwhelming as well, spending the entire fight just running away until you finally get him in a corner and kill him with a single shot. If you want more of a challenge there's harder difficulty options for you to try, but the game's hardly left me begging for more.

I also think that the game might give you too much ammo. Your ammo for the machine gun and cannon is finite, but you're given so much ammo for both of them in such high quantities that you're never going to run out. As a result, the machine gun is near useless since the cannon is just better in every way, is given tons of ammo and one-shots nearly everything. Likewise, melee attacks are also useless in spite of the potential they have to be used for conserving ammo, similar to how melee is used in Revenge of Shinobi.

You want to know what the most fierce opponent in this game is? A billboard. I'm not joking, I am convinced that the billboard has ended more playthroughs of this game than any of its enemies that actually attack you. About halfway through the game you'll run into a level that seems completely unbeatable. You just reach a dead end surrounded entirely by bottomless pits with no exits in sight. You can't jump, there's no tightropes or platforms to cross the gap with, there's just nothing here. There's these two neon purple walls, but pushing them does nothing and shooting them just results in a soft tink sound that sounds like the bullets are just ineffectively bouncing off of it, with no visual indication that shooting it is doing anything. You might shoot it a few more times but still nothing happens, so dead end right? Actually, no. If you just keep rapid firing and unloading bullets into those purple walls, eventually they fall over revealing that they were actually billboards this entire time, creating a makeshift bridge for you. I need to stress again that nearly every enemy, including the final boss, dies with one shot from the cannon. This billboard meanwhile? Absolute Chad. Tankiest opponent in the whole game. Takes eight machinegun bullets or three cannon explosives to bring down. Bow down to the mighty monolith with power beyond our mortal comprehension. Now, if that mad scientist converted this billboard into a battle robot, then we’d be screwed. It probably sounds like I’m complaining, but honestly the billboard was the most memorable part of the game for me.

One thing I will absolutely give Crack Down however is that I kind of love its UI. Yes, I know that must sound insane. I know that the entire game takes up roughly a third of the screen in single player and it still has constant slowdown even when it only has to render action on a tiny window. But honestly, I like all of the information that the UI gives you. Not only do you have the minimap letting you know where to plant every bomb, but in single player mode you also have a handy enemy list in place of player 2s screen, letting you know at a quick glance what enemies are present in the level and what kind of attacks they have at their disposal. I really think this could lend itself to a more tactical kind of game. If you had more varied weapons and abilities then you could be choosing your approach based on the level layout in the minimap, what enemies you can see in the main game window and strategize around what specific attacks you can expect from those enemies by checking the enemy list. You could almost turn this into an action strategy game of sorts with a bit more depth put into the core gameplay. Unfortunately, as it is, the strategy in this game is still limited to simply “shoot everything with the cannon before it shoots you and if that doesn't work, just use a bomb”. Not the most exciting thing in the world.

I honestly feel a bit bad for being so harsh on Crack Down, as it’s perfectly serviceable as a simple arcade game to spend some change on and run around mazes for a bit, shooting things with a friend in two player co-op. The Mega Drive port is definitely rough but they did manage to fairly faithfully transfer the gameplay of the original arcade game over. Unfortunately, although it was an early release for the Mega Drive, even for the time I can't imagine Crack Down lighting the world on fire. Gain Ground came out on Master System the same year and was ported to Mega Drive the next year, which by contrast has more variety, more levels, more weapons and more strategy. For pure run & gun gameplay, I think Alien Syndrome is far more intense and exciting, though that game sadly never received a faithful arcade port. Crack Down has a couple of good ideas but just doesn't do enough with any of them, all of the most interesting mechanics having the least done with them in a short campaign that's over before it feels like it had a chance to even start. Even if not for all of the technical shortcomings that the Mega Drive port has, the base game just isn't that good in my opinion. Ah well, at least the ending of Crack Down is hilarious. It has a post-credits reveal that's so out of left field that I genuinely love it. Look it up if you don't mind spoilers.

Page written by MSX_POCKY, 10th September 2024