Ripten Mega-Review: Crackdown 2

Crackdown was released in early 2007 to generally positive reviews. Players had a blast bounding over rooftops, throwing cars off of bridges, blowing up everything they saw in glorious mega-explosions. Now, over three years later, developer Ruffian Games has re-released the popular platformer fo- Wait, this is a sequel? Seriously? Oh. My bad, everyone.

Ruffian has taken the old idiom “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and turned it into a cautionary tale. As it turns out, even if it isn’t broken, sometimes you should still attempt to fix it. It’s true that when making a sequel, you want to carry over all of the successful elements of the preceding game. But if you don’t significantly add onto that formula, there’s no real point to making a sequel, which is something that Crackdown 2 suffers from.