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It's still brilliant. It really is. And on Xbox One X, Crackdown is even better than you remember it. The 2007 classic scales up wonderfully to 4K resolution, but the biggest takeaway here is that, remarkably, the gameplay still holds up - it's still utterly superb. I picked up the game exactly where I left off - with a tooled up, maxed-out Agent ready to take on the final gang left in the game, the villainous Shai-Gen. What happened next is Crackdown at its best: absolute carnage on the streets of Pacific City, urban warfare on a simply spectacular scale. It is - quite possibly - the best £1.50 I've ever spent on a game.Yes, £1.50. Therein lies a secondary joy of Xbox One X enhanced gaming - tracking down a reasonably priced physical copy of the original game, my 360 collection having been lent out or (shamefully) lost over the last decade. In the case of Crackdown, noted UK used game specialists CEX came up trumps with 360 copies priced extremely favourably compared to the cost of a Starbucks coffee. With an eye towards the inevitable comparisons required of a Digital Foundry project, I bought both copies in the store.
I returned to Crackdown with some degree of concern - principally because I loved the original Xbox 360 game but did worry that it had aged badly, that the open world action would fall flat nine years on and that the visuals wouldn't suit a 4K screen. On the latter count, I needn't have worried - the original game always had a distinct style, and the bump from native 720p to full 4K complements the art beautifully. The X-enhanced technique of forcing the highest quality mip maps reveals that the original textures were relatively simple in keeping with the cel-shaded style of the game, but detailed enough to the point where they don't look bad on a 4K screen.
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