I sat playing through Crackdown with a couple of guys a few nights ago trying to get my outstanding Achievements and trying to drive up the Agency Tower in the SUV (as shown HERE ) and the conversation turned to what licenses would work well with this particular game type.

Now Crackdown isn' t unique and much of the stuff has been done before in games like the GTA III series, Saints Row (which i' m finding fantastic after deciding to give it a chance), Mercenaries and Just Cause [:' (] etc, ...but Crackdown does it better than them all. The game is unbelievably solid and the sense of scope and verticality is undeniably driven home.

Until recently i' ve not been a fan of sandbox-esque games. I' ve always recognized GTA III and San Andreas as massive technical achievements on PS2 and Liberty/Vice City Stories on PSP, but i' ve never enjoyed playing them. I almost enjoyed Vice City but got bored of it after the first 10 or so hours. Mercenaries did nothing for me and Just Cause is laughable, even if it has some interesting mechanics and an extremely well done game world.

So with Crackdown blowing me away i posed the question; why is this any different?

The answer lies in the games premise. I mean i' m still in awe of the games technical merit and on some levels i find it much more impressive than Gears of War and Lost Planet, but the concept of leveling up skills by collecting orbs and taking out bosses just works [for me]

The only other sandbox game i' ve enjoyed, ...or rather am currently enjoying, is Saints Row. It' s buggy, has a dodgy framerate and is very in-your-face-crude but it' s immense fun because the gameplay mechanics are implemented so well and the physics system is so robust.

Anyway. So the conversation turned to what licenses would work well with this particular game type [whoa, deja vu!] and two sprung to mind instantly. Judge Dredd and Blade Runner.

Judge Dredd lends itself perfectly to the blueprint laid out by Crackdown. There are tons of gang-like sects, sub-bosses and bosses heavily detailed in the comics/graphic novels. Everything from weapons, vehicles, locations etc would work perfectly in a sandbox game as long as it was handled properly. Hell, Mega city One is even enclosed in a dome and split into Sectors (305 of them). You could, if you had to limit the game to just Sector 301 (The Pit).

The Judge/Criminal ratio works and there are hundreds of other aspects that easily lend themselves to a game like Crackdown.

Would you even need a linear storyline. I mean, There are no cutscenes in Crackdown and while Judge Dredd would have to be structured differently, the player could simply be tasked with ridding the streets of gangs and taking out bosses.

Now i think that' s too similar. It' d work but it' s not exactly plausible to rip off Crackdown and stick Dredd in there and i think fans of the comics would see it as a cash-in on somebody elses successful IP, but it' d work. Ideally though there would be a GTA-esque mission structure and a main story arc, but using Crackdown as a technical base for the game. If implemented properly, and faithfully then it couldn' t fail, ...and it' d be so easy too as much of the work has already been done in the comics.



Then i mentioned Blade Runner and how you could have a game set apart from the film, in the same world but with different characters, playing as a blade runner, finding and taking down replicant separatists.

Now Blade Runner wouldn' t work quite as well using Crackdown' s blueprint but a game similar to say Omnikron would work well. It' d probably have to be much more linear though but i think it could work as a sandbox game, even if it was less action orientated and more neo-noir detective than sci-fi shooter.



So are there any other licenses that would translate well into a sandbox style game?