BOSTON – PAX East is the stage for the ultimate cops-versus-criminals battle.
Positioned a few feet from each other on the Penny Arcade Expo floor this weekend are two games with close ties to Crackdown, a sleeper hit Xbox 360 game that gave the open-city crime spree a shot in the arm by adding superpowers and addictive collection mechanics. On one side, there's APB, an innovative cops-and-robbers MMO by Realtime Worlds, the creator of Crackdown. Turn your attention away from the lavish APB booth and there's Crackdown 2, developed by Ruffian Games, a studio made up of several former Realtime employees.
Both games will be released this summer; Crackdown has an official July 6 release date in the U.S.
I had seen both games in action before – APB at last year's E3 and Crackdown 2 at a Microsoft event earlier this year – but hadn't gotten the chance to play either. At PAX East, I went hands-on for the first time with these two very different children of Crackdown.
Dragging myself out of bed for the very beginning of a conference day is never easy, but putting a Crackdown 2 appointment at 9:30 AM is an excellent way to assure that I'm at the convention center ready to roll, bright and early. Microsoft had many stations playing eight-player versus matches of the Xbox 360 game. Besides the free-for-all and team-based deathmatch varieties, there's also Rocket Tag, in which players try to hold onto an orb for as long as possible before another player frags them with a rocket.
We played Team Deathmatch. Jumping back into Crackdown is like riding a bike; you never forget how to leap up the sides of buildings and collect things. I had to hold back on my impulses to just run around the level and see what I could find, mostly because I knew there were not going to be any agility orbs hidden in the PvP maps. Not that they would have done any good, because everybody in PvP is fully jacked up with intense jumping ability. In case even this is not enough, glowing launch pads around the arena will blast you skyward so you can glide above the arena.
To be fair, jumping around like a moron is probably the worst possible strategy in multiplayer because it suspends you in the air, wide open, in full view of the other team. When you jump, Crackdown 2 turns into Duck Hunt with you in the role of the duck. So the smart idea is probably to stay on the ground and hug the walls so nobody can find you, but what's the fun in that? So of course we were all jumping around like gleeful children in springtime and getting shot out of the air and laughing like idiots.
Crackdown's basic mechanics are just plain fun. Unfortunately, the basic mechanics were all we got to try out at PAX East: 10 minutes of straightforward team deathmatch in a simple arena. We ran around! We shot people! There's truly not much else to say about the experience. What's going to make or break this game is the campaign, and we haven't been able to touch this yet.
Billy Thomson, lead designer of the first game and the creative director of Crackdown 2, told me on the show floor that the single-player game will contain more hooks that attempt to get solo players to bring their friends into the game for cooperative mayhem. For instance, there are certain collectible orbs scattered about the city that you can only grab if another player is there with you. If you approach one in the game – it'll sit there, tantalizing, and you can't take it – it will ask you if you want to invite friends to join you.
APB, meanwhile, is built entirely around interaction with other humans – you couldn't avoid them even if you wanted to. After messing around with the PC game's character customization tools in the nonviolent "social district," I jumped into the virtual city's mean streets to bust some punks. As an Enforcer, I'm meeting up with a variety of contacts who give me complex multi-part missions to do in the city. In the mission I did, I had to drive to someone's parked car and break into it to get some more info. Once I'd ferried that back to my headquarters, I found out that there was a building I had to go raid for evidence.
These were basic fetch quests, running back and forth between points on the map. But here's where it got interesting.
As I walked away from the building with evidence in hand, I saw another player. At this point, I couldn't shoot him and he couldn't shoot me – we were playing in the same world, and he was a criminal and I a cop, but there was no underlying criminal action that connected us yet.
"He knows you're an enforcer," said Chris Collins, the Realtime Worlds community manager giving me the demo, "so he's not going to do anything with you watching."
I walked past him and wheeled around to see him stealing a car. This is one of the game's key mechanics – I've just witnessed him committing a criminal act, so now I could get involved. Or I could have, if I knew what key to press. This might be a good time to mention that I have no skill whatsoever at using a keyboard for action games; just using the WASD keys to move and holding Shift simultaneously to sprint is high-level finger gymnastics for me.
So you can imagine that when Collins told me to point the mouse at the car and press "Alt," I wasn't able to do it in time and the criminal sped away. Had I managed to press the right key, I'd now be chasing this criminal – I could jump into a car and try to stop him from completing his nefarious goal. But I didn't. So I moved on with my mission.
As I got into a car and sped towards HQ, a dialog window popped up indicating that a criminal was now after me. "The game's decided that you're having an easy time of it, so it's sent this guy after you," said Collins. Suddenly, as I was walking into headquarters, this guy showed up and shot me in the back. I kept respawning near the mission, and he kept killing me every time I tried to go in the door to drop off my evidence.
"What happens if I can't get by him?" I asked.
"You lose the mission when you run out of time," said Collins. "You still get some rewards because you did make some progress in the mission, but, uh... not much."
After this guy had killed me a few times, I ran around the other side of the building hoping to catch him off-guard. Using the element of surprise, I was finally able to kill him first. Or rather, I disabled him. He was kneeling on the ground with his hands behind his head.
"Okay, now run up behind him and press F!" Collins said. I knew how this was going to go. Luckily, before I could fail at this, I ran out of time and lost the mission.
As I continued to play APB, I watched the chat window in the corner to see what the beta testers were saying to each other. "There should be a way to identify all the people playing at PAX," one said. "We should all gang up on them."
That's one of the problems that APB is going to face: Other people are dicks. Hopefully the final game's balance keeps things fun even in a world where player-versus-player is unavoidable.
At this point, I'm more looking forward to Crackdown 2, since it's a known quantity: Even with the game's increased focus on multiplayer, the single-player experience is calling me back. I don't know how I'll deal with having to worry about real-life griefers on APB – even if the entire point of the game is that they're supposed to be trying to interfere with my actions.
