Once you’ve played a couple of matches, you’ve seen it all. That and the slow-charging Overdrive buff, which enhances your firepower, are the only chance you have to turn the tables on someone who sees you before you see them. In my experience, the majority of tactics during a firefight – besides deciding when to start one – consist of waiting until you and an enemy are fully committed to killing each other and then popping your overshield a second before it’s over, ensuring a kill and escape. However, as you’re already so mobile by default there’s no reason to ever choose something that enhances your movement, so you’d be crazy to pass on the Overshield. You also get access to one of two gadgets: a deployable launch pad or an overshield, to take with you into combat. Firearms are best for killing players but do limited structure damage, while explosive weapons excel at both but have a slower rate of fire and better range. “Wrecking Zone has an anemic pool of nine weapons, compared to the dozens in the campaign, and you can carry one firearm and one explosive at a given time. Additionally, there’s a player-killing, building-breaking Flying Fist melee charge attack or a ground-pound slam that recharges a few seconds after use. To promote this idea of climbing to an advantage position, everyone has two air jumps and two air dashes to use before needing to touch a solid surface again – and that’s not even counting the tons of man-cannons ready to fling you into the sky. Because the auto-lock gunplay is so incredibly simplistic and skill-free, just like in the campaign, the most important part of staying alive is positioning and fast movement. As long as you delay a lock-on and pull the trigger the second you have an effective line of sight, it’s almost hard to lose a one-on-one gun fight. “The bigger problem with both modes is that while there are subtleties to be learned with regard to weapon effectiveness at range – shotguns and machine pistols require close range, for example – most fights in Wrecking Zone boil down to guerilla tactics wherein whoever sees the other person and starts shooting first usually wins. It’s a smart decision that makes you focus on one of Crackdown’s best qualities: its constant movement. It’s essentially Kill Confirmed from Call of Duty, where standard Team Deathmatch rules apply with the added caveat that you have to collect your opponents’ token after killing them to bank the point. Of the two basic modes in Wrecking Zone, I preferred Agent Hunter. Wrecking Zone is like a tech demo in this way, where you’re supposed to admire what’s going on behind the scenes and ignore the fact that it doesn’t really matter. It’s so separate from everything going on that if you were to somehow time it perfectly so that the statue were to fall directly onto an enemy, they wouldn’t take any damage. But the problem is that for as cool as it is to see building shrapnel rain down from the sky or a structure lumber toward the ground under its own weight, it’s shoehorned into a multiplayer mode that does little to make use of it. With each breaking piece, there’s a crunchy shudder and boom, and it made me imagine how much more entertaining the single-player/co-op would be if I could bring down skyscrapers on that map. And it is genuinely impressive to barrel a rocket toward the ankles of a massive granite statue and watch in the unfolding seconds as the weight and mass of the stone humanoid force it down, cracking the floor into chunks as it makes contact. “Destruction is the absolute high water mark in Wrecking Zone.
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