Unfortunately, Crackdown annoyances start with the mission variety, or lack thereof. Finding orbs notwithstanding, repeatedly killing the same old scum bags wears thin. At least with the Grand Theft Auto games, Rockstar breaks up the monotony by tossing in escort and delivery missions. With Crackdown, players kill gang members, rinse and repeat.

Furthermore, the targeting system craps out during firefights. Instead of landing on a gang member, it often gets stuck on a car, dead body or even a police officer. This leads to plenty of cheap deaths.

Freestylin’

Finally, the audio should have been better. The varied soundtrack provides great ambience, but some of the guns, most notably the shotgun, sound muffled and the constantly repeating dialogue (even in different languages) gets annoying.

However, and despite the vanilla missions and targeting snafu, Crackdown stands out as one of the Xbox 360’s guiltiest pleasures. Countless hours will be spent uncovering orbs, leveling up, killing enemies and playing co-op. It definitely stands on its own, especially with 80 different achievements and content downloads, making it much more than the host to the much coveted Halo 3 beta. Scores of people will purchase it for that alone, but Crackdown deserves to be played. It may not be fun in a month, but for right now, it definitely satisfies.