Crackdown
The first Crackdown was a fluke. I swear it was. All of us Xbox 360 owners did not have any kind of open world game yet, and the only reason anyone got this game was for the Halo 3 beta, but still, tons of people bought the game thinking they wouldn’t like it, and the game ended up being something the GTA‘s have’t been since San Andreas, which is to say, fun.
Crackdown also has the GREATEST achievements of any 360 game, period. At one point, you can get a giant globe in the middle of town, break it off, roll it into the bad part of town, and if you roll over 75 gang members in two minutes you get an achievement. THAT, my friends, is EXACTLY what an achievement should be. If it can lengthen a game AND make you laugh, all while remaining fun, they are doing something right
Crackdown takes the open world ideas of GTA and asks: What if you could be a superhero in this world? A question also asked by the far inferior (unofficial remake) Saints Row IV. And all you had to do was play this game for about five minutes to know, this was unique and awesome. There were cars you had, but early on in the game, you would power up, and eventually run faster than any car in the game and leap higher than any helicopter, so really, by the end of this game you are leaping from rooftop to rooftop, hurling cars through the air as if they were light as rocks, and beating down 50+ groups of guys without batting an eye. In the sense of a game that could make you feel like you really WERE a superhero, Arkham City and Crackdown cannot be beat.
Just don’t play the sequel.