For a 22+ year old game, Crack Down is still a surprising amount of fun. More of a Gauntlet-style puzzle game than anything else, the levels are nice, short and quite challenging. With co-op and the emulator's savestate feature, I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys a trip down the far reaches of console memory lane. While I wouldn't sneeze at paying $3.50 for it, picking it up in the Mega Drive Classics Pack is a much better deal and still worth the cost.

better than Crackdown 2

The original CounterStrike! Sorta!

Be a cool bro, walk around and plant bombs and punch guys with flamethrowers in the face. A really unique style of gameplay with an impossibly badly designed UI that somehow takes up 3/4 of the screen, leaving all actually gameplay happening in the lower left-hand corner. Still a lot of fun.

Crack Down is a top-down shooting action game that also has 2 players coop. And a quite slow-paced one. It's a port of arcade game which was made by Sega of Japan and released in 1989. The port itself however was made by Hot-B who wasn't even given source code because Sega of Japan management was as silly as ever, so it's not exactly accurate gmaeplay-wise at all. And it was also published by Sage's Creation instead of Sega in US for some reason. It was released in 1991 on 4 Megabit ROM cartridge, quite a standart.
And no, it's called "Crack Down", not "Crackdown", it has nothing to do with X360 game, please stop.

The game that you have here is nothing more than emulation of Sega Genesis version.


Now, for usual technical part about Sega's emulation here:
The Sega Classic games that you purchase on Steam count as DLCs for "Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics" game that should appear in your library.
By default it runs 3D bedroom Hub. Since emulator itself is based on 2006 one made in Java and 3D Hub is made in Unity, both famous for having not-good optimization, the performance in this hub varies from one PC to another. Sound lags as well.
It's recommended to run Simple Launcher, which can be done by Right Mouse Clicking the Sega Classic title in Steam library and selecting it. It still isn't perfectly accurate emulation, but it's acceptable. Sadly, it doesn't have user-friendly access to mods.
However, Simple Launcher has it's fair share of glitches as well. It can crash. And it does the second time you go to main menu, so always quit after saving there so it doesn't crash when you want to save next time! Also, yes, emulator supports quick saves.
As alternative, you can use external emulator to run games that you purchased. Kinda like when people use ZDoom source port to run Doom on Steam. Sega kindly placed in all games that you purchased in "uncompressed ROMs" folder that program itself doesn't use, the file for this one being "CrackDown_USA.SGD".
I also demand you to read digital manual of this game first. Go to "manuals" folder of game root and open "CD_PC_MG_EFIGS_US.pdf".

While the game has multiplayer mode for two players, the emulator doesn't have any online function for that, so it's local only.

This game has constant slowdowns, but they aren't signifant enough to ruin enjoyment.


The plot of this game is that the game, which is called QUACKDOWN according to voice sample at title screen, has 1253 enemy soldiers, 392 time delay bombs, 140 laser cannons, 28 sinkholes and one kickbutt attitude. But it still has room for you.
Nah, I took it from the printed ad. I don't think that they actually counted those.
Instead we have two special agents Ben Breaker and Andy Attacker out to stop the artificial life army of Mr. K mad scientist by setting up Clystron bombs in Atlantis city where he resides. And destroy goat-demon-robot who is barely mentioned and heroes do it automatically in credits and it looks like it acme out from Doom 2.

The gameplay is a top-down action game, somewhat slow-paced. You don't exactly run fast and shoot everywhere. Instead you maneuver around levels, flanking around to shoot at enemies side or timing your movement to come around from around corner to shoot enemy between his shots. Using the fact that enemies can shoot only in 4 directions but you can do it in 8, making you special agent. Stalk-n-shoot with one-hit deaths, sorta, but not exactly, still action. The objective is to place all the bombs and get out, while you get 3 minutes per level which seems to be just right amount. You got normal shots and rockets that do more damage and penetrate through enemies. Ammo for those is limited but you never lose them by dieing and you quickly get hundreds of them. And you also get superbombs that destroy everything on your screen while hero yells something just like in Shinobi.
Oh yea. This game reminds me of Shinobi if it was designed as top-town game. Pretty fancy.

Also, here are some hints:
Protip 1: Stage 2 Act 4 has electrical fields that really stops some people on their tracks. Mostly the last one you encounter. Just move straight through it and use superbomb as electric charges get near to remove them and give you valuable time to cross it.
Protip 2: Stage 2 Act 3 takes place on rooftop so those background tiles on sides of level represent streets, not strange walls. And the seemingly short blue walls on right side are supposed to represent billboards that you have to shoot few times to make bridge. Don't know, this stage's graphics just were confusing.
Protip 3: in Stage 4 Act 2 you can destroy slime generators.

During gameplay the screen is pretty much divided into three parts. The top half of screen has stats for each players and a map which shows layout of level, position of players and where you have to set bombs. That's about it and it actually looks very basic compared to Arcade which actually pretty much showed everything on a level, including enemies. It was like showing whole gameplay in smaller screen. But oh well. Lower half you get two screens for each players. The nice thing about this port is that one screen is used to show enemies stats if you play in single-player so it's not completely waste of space. But the action part is still quite small and still reminds you that it's made for 2 players. But eh, I think it's alright.

Too bad that it's not a very good port. Graphics are extremely bland and small. Music is actually still decent. Yuzo Koshiro made originals, so you should immeditly like them. And as said, Hot-B had no source port and as a result they had to guess the logic. Enemies AI is quite different from arcade, for example flamethrower enemy could shoot in any direction in Arcade while in Genesis port he can do it only in 4 directions. Still can't escape his projectiles by hugging the wall so he still fills a needed role. Levels layout got changed. Hero now moves slightly faster. But the flaw that this port brought are slowdowns, which also takes away "hero now moves slightly faster". You will experience it anytime when you aren't near the edge of a screen with anything going on. I really don't know how Hot-B made Blast Processor struggle while showing nothing impressive, but it does. 90% of times you play game at constant slow speed, which might help somewhat at avoiding projectiles, but it's still nasty. It gets even worse in 2 players mode!

Then again, if you play on any other emulator, try switching to PAL/EU mode. While it's in general slower, being 50hz instead of 60hz, you actually get less slowdowns due to PAL system having to render less frames and it's more stable this way!

Oh yea, and there is two players coop. There is no friendly fire, no collision against each other and each player can travel independently thanks to the power of splitscreen. I didn't get to play with anybody to know how fun multiplayer is, but it should be at very least some nice coop experience. Each player has to do less work for sure. Maybe some flanking.

Oh yea, and there is options. You can set custom amounts of credits, starting amount of items, sound test, controls and difficulty. Difficulty only impacts the amount of score required to get 1-UP. Like, on Easy you get the first one at 10,000 and then every 30,000. On Normal it's every 40,000 points. And on Hard you gain the first life at 20,000 and then every 50,000. It doesn't impact much.

And well, I was on a wall deciding if I should recommend this game or not. Or more exactly, if this port is good enough on it's own or not. It's very certain that it wasn't ported good and you get constant slowdowns all the time. I really don't know how people don't notice those. But then I think that it was fine enough on it's own, even enjoyable still. So, yeh, it's good. Good enough. Enjoyable despite the flaws.