18 years after it owned the Xbox 360 era, Crackdown deserves so much better – and should have one more chance to prove itself

“Skills for kills, Agent. Skills for kills.” That minor line from Crackdown 1 has been burned into my brain for nearly two decades, a strange little earworm that isn’t even a particularly significant comment in the game itself. Sometimes this NPC bark triggers when you empty three boxes of LMG ammo into a jaywalker. Sometimes it happens when you pick up a burning eighteen-wheeler and huck it down the street, smearing panicked criminals into the tarmac. And sometimes it happens when you run down a drug dealer with a batmobile, slap a sticky bomb on the mangled corpse and kick the explosive carcass at his closest friends, turning him into an improvised payload.

Perhaps it’s less the line itself that sticks in my mind, and more the surreal and spectacular events that always prompt it. Either way, I can’t deny that Crackdown left an impression on me as one of those damn good times of the mid 2000s. But eighteen years and two sequels later, Crackdown went from one of the hottest Xbox 360 IPs, standing alongside icons like Fable 2 and Halo 3, to a minor Microsoft footnote. What the hell happened?

Lawful evil