Crackdown 2 Deluge Pack review
The Deluge Pack for Crackdown 2 is finally here, but is it worth your time and change?
When you first boot up Crackdown 2, you will notice that the DLC for the game is entirely separate and gives you just four maps to pick from. You can choose to host a game, join one, or invite your friends in. But unless you’ve hardly put down Crackdown 2 since the games release, the Deluge Pack is going to be a rather big challenge if you decide to go it solo.
But playing solo is not how the DLC is intended to be played. If you ever expect to see past wave fifteen, you’re going to need some additional players to get close to the 50th round. So I would advise against dropping 560 points if all you intend to do is play it solo; co-op is certainly where it is at. Though players can be found rather easily still, you will find getting through the waves of infected civilians much easier with every additional player.
Like the Toy Box DLC which came before, you get a good handful of avatar rewards which are rewards for completing sets of achievements. Yet this is where the highest challenge of the game comes from, in that while you only get four locations to choose from you will find yourself spending multiple runs achievement hunting.
Each round starts with a basic set of weapons and tasks you with defending a package. Success rewards you and your team with a select few new weapons, be it just a refill of your gun, more grenades, or bigger and better weapons.
You need to learn the waves on some scale, because taking a UV gun to a Cell wave is most likely going to time out the group unless they are carrying more appropriate weaponry. This will usually mean you are at the front of the queue for the next wave, and allows you to begin reducing the numbers of oncoming Cell, while your teammates refill on ammo or expended grenades.
Capture the Orb, the new online multiplayer mode, is somewhat fun with sixteen players trying to capture them, but luckily you don’t need to pay for this, as there is a free preview pack which gives you this for well, free.
It’s a little bit like Halo Reach’s rally mode, with the players trying to capture as many of these orbs as they can while avoiding players and death. Some manage to stay tactical, getting ahead of the orbs and intercepting it, but stay in front of its direct path and what you will find is it runs straight to the nearest player that has been chasing it all along.
The concept is fun for a while, but eventually long term Crackdown 2 players will have the paths locked down and will win the games that bit faster than you would expect. But if you get a game of fresh to the mode players, you can have such a fun time and it all turns into a massive game of cat and mouse with the orb slipping out of some players’ grasp.
While 560 points does seem a touch too much (400 would have been the sweet spot), you do get a fair bit of content. But I found other games have either already had the exact same offerings for a while now, or just do it better and this is more for those players who just can’t get enough of the crack in Crackdown 2.
Don’t get me wrong you get a decent amount of content, but to the savvy gamer that has played Crackdown 2 since release, you may have spotted the avatar awards related to this DLC and the one before it, and maybe questioned if this was all premade content withheld from the disc.
