The new Crackdown content got me back into the game with a fervor. Those eleven agility orbs I had left? Yeah, only eight left now, baby. Chugging away on those secret orbs too. The boosted noise really helps.

The Harpoon Gun is my new favorite weapon, just edging out the heat-seeking rocket launcher due to my preference of silly ragdolls over large fireballs. Aside from it being being practically a one-hit kill weapon, the first time I was fighting some thugs on a street, let a harpoon fly, and it happened to pin aforementioned thug to an innocent civilian vehicle that just happened to be passing behind him at the time? And then the civilian freaked out and sped off, dragging this poor shmuck, for ten blocks? Yeah, I was hooked right about then.

The minigun is enjoyable, but it feels like it could almost do better with a second, second and a half shaved off of its warmup time. You’re awful exposed while you wait for that maybe to spin and start spitting justice.

The lobber I am less impressed with. While it makes a lot of the “boom” we all love, it’s just not a terribly practical weapon. If I have an enemy right in front of me, say, ten feet away, clear line of sight, and my weapon is going to fire a dozen rockets at him… could someone tell me why they need to circle the block a few times before making contact? Are they just making sure there are no other rockets out there, en route, that are hoping for the kill? Are they wary to step on the proverbial toes of other rockets? “Excuse me? Hello? This thug? Anyone going to kill him? Anyone mind if we do? If anyone has dibs that’s fine, but we’ll kill him if no one else wants? That cool? Guys? Ok cool, we’ll go back and kill him now.”

The three new vehicles are fun, despite their lack of cool transformy-ness.

But the gem of the update, and it was the last feature I got around to trying, is the Keys to the City mode. I played it for about 10 minutes and was engorged. Enough to know that the destruction I was causing was moot unless someone else was there to witness it. So I dragged Brian into co-op Keys to the City.

Brian’s headset wasn’t working (we later discovered his cats had chewed through the cord) so we were unable to communicate. But that was fine. We developed our own in-game language. We spoke explosives. Of the Fuckthatsalotofdestruction dialect. It’s good stuff.

Updates like this are why I so whole heartedly support downloadable content in games. Crackdown was already such an incredible game, and that when an update comes along that gets you back into an old game, makes it worth playing again, even if for a short time… it’s awesome. Seriously, this is like $30 worth of new content. I feel like I stole it for $10.

If they’re working on another update of this magnitude, more power to them.