Hey Guys - I figured I should give you an update on what you are going to get with the demo.

First off, Crackdown is controlled by three gangs – Los Muertos, The Volk and Shai-Gen Corporation. I pretty sure most of you know that by now. Anyhow, each gang controls a district within Pacific City. For the demo we are going to let you dish out justice in about half of the Los Muertos district. You’ll also have access to the Agency headquarters too, which is where you’ll actually start the game. These two areas combined will give you a huge area to play in and explore, without of course giving the whole game away. You’ll also be able to see the rest of the world, including the Volk and Shai-Gen controlled areas - you just won’t be able to get there during the demo as there is a blueish/clear wall that prevents you from traveling into these areas. There are definitely some killer buildings and areas that I know you are going to want to explore over there, but you’ll have to wait until the full game is out to do that.

Furthermore, we’ve accelerated skills progression in the game. That means it won’t take as long as it does in the full game to get your Agent to higher levels in any of the five core skills. We did this so that you guys could experience what it’s like to ‘level up’ an Agent and thus see the difference between what it’s like to be a rookie Agent vs. a veteran Agent. We also do this because the demo will likely be used at retail kiosks (those stations you see in game shops), where generally people have less time to play the game than they do at home, so we of course want them to ‘get it’ even during a quick, walk-up gameplay session. As you play you’ll be able to level up any of your Agent’s core skills in any fashion you want. So you might decide to go after your driving skill first or perhaps you might try to level them all up evenly. It’s really up to you. Once you get to two stars in any attribute, you’ll have 30 minutes to play before the demo times out. Once it times out, it’s game over. But don’t fret there is plenty of gameplay here. We ran a pre-release version of this demo at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in early January and we were seeing people play for a couple of hours before the game timed out on them. We also saw people max out skills. They had to work hard to do it once the timer kicked in, but it can be done!! Trust me there is a lot of fun to be had here. The length of any given session will of course vary depending on your personal play style. You can never save your game in demos (that’s Microsoft’s policy) so when you restart the demo you’ll start with a rookie Agent again. What’s cool about that is that you can try working on new skills, skills that you might not have gotten to in a previous play session.

As you’ve no doubt heard you can also play this in Singleplayer Mode or in Online Cooperative Mode. One thing you should know - in the full game you’ll be able to join games in progress (meaning you could be playing for a while and then have a friend join you at any time during the game), but for the demo this has been turned this off so if you want to play co-op with a friend you’ll want to send them an invite when you fire up the demo.

There is of course still a huge variety of weapons and vehicles to try out too. The gang boss battles we’ve included are some of our personal favorites as well. Undoubtedly you are in for some good fun. Tuesday is right around the corner…!