You know, Crackdown has been touting its great use of memory and lack of pop-in as one of the major strengths of the game, so I decided to do some testing tonight and came away with some disappointing results.  My first test was to sit at an intersection and pile up the cars so I could make them explode. 

This simple task revealed two problems.  The first is that cars do indeed disappear by looking away from them.  After stacking about 3 to 4 cars, I went to get another one and when I turned around 1 had disappeared.  You could eventually stack a decent number, but the disappearing got worse so it made it a much tougher task than it should have been. 

The second problem was that there is a noticeable pop-in with cars and pedestrians, and I found some evidence the draw distance may not be real.  I ended up deciding to do the car stacking thing in the middle of the road at night.  So I sat their waiting for cars...nothing came.  I thought maybe it was just because it was night and there were less cars, but even then the problems started cropping up.  I would look one way, and cars almost always came from where I wasn't looking, even if there had been no cars there when I was looking 3 seconds ago.  Also, I would see headlights in the distance that would move towards me, but never get to me.  They would either disappear, or just get stuck in one place.  This may be because they aren't actual interactable cars, but just a moving background leading you to believe there is a good draw distance.

The last test I tried was one the develpers had talked about a few times, which was to fill a dumpster with dead bodies and either throw it off a building or cause it to explode.  However, I couldn't get that far.  After putting about about 8-10 bodies in the dumpster, which was barely enough to cover the bottom, the problems started.  The problems were bodies either going right through the dumpster and never going in, or the bodies hitting an invisible wall and never actually able to enter the dumpster.  So I don't know if the devs had some sort of trick, but I just couldn't get a reasonable amount of bodies in the dumpster.

So I don't hate Crackdown, I actually think it's a pretty fun game.  I'm just pointing out some things that really disappoint me about the game, and are areas where I feel I was mislead by the devs.  In fact, given a few scale-backs, I could easily see this as an Xbox 1 game.  Does that make it a bad game, no, but certainly not one I'm going to spend $60 on.