Crackdown

Crackdown was also posted by Stan a few months ago under similar circumstances- Xbox was giving it away for free, and neither of us can resist a free game with a good reputation (I'm avoiding the adver-games that Xbox has also been releasing free of charge). And there's not much for me to say about the game that he didn't cover already. It's another sandbox game where this time you're ostensibly playing for the "good guys"- sure, you slaughter civilians indiscriminately, but this time the game gives you a stern warning when you do! It does have high points that harken back to the glory days of Grand Theft Auto 3, where you could just spawn and start causing massive carnage within 5 seconds. There's a joy anyone can get out of making dozens of cars crash into eachother on a highway, and Crackdown ups the ante by letting you upgrade your character with super-human abilities, while oddly enough never making it feel like a "superhero game" like the similar (but much better) Infamous series. The more you play the more athletic your character gets, until he's jumping from the streets onto rooftops, or picking up minivans and throwing them off of bridges. You're supposedly "cleaning up the streets" of your city as you "crack down" on gangs who are all very clearly just groups of minorities and whose district names are all conveniently turned to English words when the gangs are overthrown- I found it a little funny that the citizens of Latino-run "Los Muertos" would react so positively to the city changing it's name to "Green Bay", but that almost feels deliberately counter-intuitive. Still though the gameplay mostly checks out, as the developers refuse to hold your hand and simply let you decide how you want to progress through the game. Rather than a strictly-ordered set of missions with different parts of the city opening up as you progress, you get the entire city and all "missions" available from the start, including what would be the "final boss" in more structured games. The levels themselves are really just 21 different assassination missions, and sometimes you barely even need to enter whatever building your next target is in before offing them. It's completely up to you how you want to take them out, which saved the developers' time from making big elaborate missions, but also provides a more open-ended experience than other sandbox games. You can enter into a warehouse shooting everything in sight and working your way to the big bad guy, or you could stake out the building and try to find a potential secret entrance. This can unfortunately lead to the game's biggest downfall, it's half-baked platforming segments in which your protagonist, literally the most athletic man in the world, has difficulty jumping backwards more than a foot or two; and often you'll just have to take your chances guessing whether a ledge is grabbable or not- I could find no real pattern in that. Aside from that Crackdown was mostly a fun time-waster, and I'm on board for the series- there's a second game out already, and a third seems likely soon on the Xbox One. They got me hooked, so it seems like Microsoft's plan of releasing old games for free actually works. Hey I guess there was plenty for me to say!