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I know if you were being reductionist, you could boil many game concepts down to a paragraph, but I swear, I'm doing no boiling. It's the same thing. Again and again and again. You'll never fight an enemy that presents any thing close to a challenge, you'll never meet another character, you'll never hear another scrap of dialog (save for the omnipresent, disembodied voice of the Agency Director, who's annoyingly repetitive as often as he's mildly entertaining). Rather than improve the pretense for the power fantasy laid down by Realtime Worlds in Crackdown, new torchbearer Ruffian Games seems to have tried to eliminate it all together. There are some scattered audio logs that give a bit more backstory to the creatures and gangs you're fighting, but they rarely dovetail with the things you're actually doing in the world.

That world, by the way, is the same one you already explored in Crackdown, if a touch more run down. Tack that on to the loads of comically plain textures and frequent slowdown and you've got a graphical package that's doing nothing to alleviate the sense of déjà vu. Pacific City may have been, as the Agency Director claimed at the end of Crackdown, "only the beginning," but nobody thought to tell Ruffian.

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