Seeing Crackdown behind closed doors at X05 in Amsterdam is like looking at what the future of Grand Theft Auto would have been like if, perhaps Take-Two or Rockstar hadn't been around. Sort of like thinking about how Led Zeppelin would have sounded like if John Bonham hadn't died. Or what the world would be like if John F. Kennedy had lived. Well, perhaps that's a stretch, but the point is David Jones isn't dead, though in a way he has very much come back to life.
A third-person action-adventure game enabling single-player and co-op play, Crackdown takes the GTA concept and expands, contracts, and forages deep for open gameplay in ways you wouldn't have dreamed of. First and foremost, the large open city -- which only loads once, the rest streams in -- is designed for platform-style movement, so it's built with a hefty level of verticality. You'll constantly jump, shimmy, lunge, and use the game's particularly strange, moon-based physics to leap across massive gaps, in some cases leaping from rooftop to rooftop. When you land, contact-sensitive edges enable you to cling to window sills, roof top edges, and more.
