The demo (single and co-op) for Crackdown hit Live yesterday and it’s awesome. As good as I was hoping. Take the “I want to screw around” gameplay of GTA and mash it with The Incredible Hulk game and you pretty much have Crackdown. You’re a super cop in a city gone south from 3 crime mobs, it’s your job to clean up the city. You start out weak, but as you progress you gain levels in agility, driving, strength, fire arms, and explosives. You’re weak to begin with but once you get going you’ll be jumping over buildings, throwing trucks down streets and cracking skulls left and right with wreckless abandon.

The game looks like a comic book, a mild cell shaded look is in effect. The game pops with color, the physics are great (you can make massive chain explosions sending all sorts of shit flying) and the sound is equally impressive. Take the cool shit you thought was great to do in GTA and make it look awesome and play smooth as silk. The draw distance is insane, there is no fog hiding shit, cars don’t pop in and out of view 200 feet away from you. You can look down entire city blocks and see shit moving around, lights changing. The day/night cycle looks terrific and the game is huge, the demo gives you a 1/3 of the map to run around in. It’s huge. There are sky scrapers that you can climb and jump over, it’s just not just a wide city, it’s vertically huge as well.

Plus, online co-op. You can work together or do shit in completely different parts of the world. It’s the new game to check out, comes out in the middle of February.

I’ve talked myself into a frenzy, I’m going to go play it right now.