The demo finally made it to the Xbox Live Marketplace on Tuesday with a massive 1.24 gig download. Surprisingly, for me at least, the download was quick.

As I began single player demo, I was under-whelmed. Nothing was really impressing me (cell-shaded graphics, sparse environment) until I hopped into my police-issue super-car and jumped out into the Crackdown world. Then this game goes nuts.

You play a police officer in charge of ridding Pacific City of gangs and their kingpins. As you pursue the local thugs you can find or earn power ups to increase your strength and jumping ability. The more jumping you can do, the more places you can go and the more baddies you can take out.

The best way I can describe it is a cartoony Grand Theft Auto with better action, better power-ups, better sound, better cars and better control. Oh yeah, and insane violence. You have only 30 minutes in this sand-box demo to do whatever you want (races, crime patrols, missions, jumping)... 30 minutes flies by like the time warp that occurs when you hit the snooze button on your alarm clock.

For the demo, the developers allow you to power-up you character quicker than what will happen in the final game. This is such a savvy move by the game's creators. It really has me excited about the final product.

As for the gameplay, Crackdown is fantastic fun. You're not limited to just following missions and simple shooting. As you get stronger, almost anything that isn't bolted down can be used as a weapon. Fling cars into a crowd of gang members, hurl a dumpster into traffic, use bodies as bowling balls... it's a blast.

The sound is great too. The guns sound awesome and pack a real kick to the game. Oh, and the music, presented the way your used to with GTA (in the cars), is top notch... the demo has real songs by real artists that I know!

I tried online co-op a few times, but it usually ended in frustration. After being booted out of the lobby several times and having to restart the game, I was place into combat with another gamer who vanished mid-game. I'm holding out for vs. mode in the release version.

I'm happy that the Halo 3 beta promise will mean this game will have huge online support and gamer support in general. It's going to be a good February.