Crackdown - updated hands-on

When welast previewedCrackdown, we were larger than life. We vaulted and raced through the fictional Pacific City, leaving behind cracked concrete from our super feet and broken criminal bodies from our super fists, guns, car hoods and... again, feet. Yeah, we could kick a man a mile if we wanted to and it felt awesome.

But, thanks to helpful codes provided by the game's very generous developers, we were playing the GTA-meets-Superman action title at its highest levels. When the game ships on February 20th, how will you build your ground-floor hero to these same dizzying heights? We recently sat down and restarted our crime-fighting career from the beginning to see exactly how the evolution of a mutant vigilante works.

You actually start Crackdown as a relatively normal human being, with only slightly heightened powers. Sure, you wake up in a secret island keep wearing a high-tech bulletproof suit. And you drive a turbo-charged prototype car to work. And you can jump ten feet into the air. But we wanted to jump twenty...

To do so, we needed to collect glowing green "agility" icons that were spread across the metropolitan landscape. While this might sound like a momentum-killing time sink, it's actually set up as a natural extension of your preferred playing style. We loved using our extraordinary abilities to leap from rooftop to rooftop and, conveniently, that's where the majority of the agility orbs could be found. So, just by doing what we were already having a blast doing, we easily gained a level and could suddenly run faster and jump higher.