A sandbox game that lets you play as a sort of Supercop out to clean the streets of criminal gangs. The whole game is from a 3rd person perspective and your character levels and gains points into 5 attributes: Agility, Driving, Explosives, Strength and Firearms. By using those different abilities effectively you gain experience and you are able to do a lot more. By the end of the game you'll be able to carry around huge trucks, jump over tall buildings and shoot people from very long distances like a superhero.

The game shares a lot of aspects with the popular GTA series, you are free to do whatever you want, you don't necessarily have to go on missions constantly and playing the game and having fun with it is the main aim of Crackdown. On the other hand, the game really focuses on action and improves on the shooting and fighting aspects of GTA greatly, but takes away from a lot of the side amusements that GTA had. This makes this game a much more action packed, but also more shooter oriented.

You move through three Islands in the game with each island representing a more difficult task to clean up and eliminate gang leaders. The main story is really just the player getting briefings about different mini bosses and bosses that control differnet aspects of a gang and that you eliminate to weaken the gang further.

The strange thing about Crackdown is that you can go straight after the big bosses right from the start, but your odds of beating them are very low. So the player takes their time leveling their skills by using them in the huge city in different ways and eliminating smaller gang bosses to weaken certain aspects of a gang in order to allow for taking on the final gang leaders more easily.

Crackdown features online co-op, racing minigames, stunts and possibly the most addictive collection aspect of any game in the form of blue and green orbs. The green orbs are placed in different locations at different heights and require you to figure out the best way to reach them and also to up your acrobatics skills, while the blue orbs are usually hidden ones and are more similar to the usual collecting in other games.

Probably two things define this game other than that it is a sandbox game and it's an action 3rd person shooter and those are: the massive size of the world and the fact that a lot of the gameplay takes place vertically rather than horizontally. Every single building you see in the game, no matter how high and impossible to climb it seems, you can climb if you are skilled or experiences enough which really adds another fun aspect to the game.

The graphics also stand out as it has a sort of cel shaded look and gives the game a kind of comic book feel that was probably the aim of the developers. This is a great example of the kind of game that gives you freedom to play around and do things the way you like it, the total opposite of a linear game.