If you’re excited at the prospect of playing Crackdown because, like me, you reckon it’ll be great, then prepare to get even more excited: a demo of the game will be released on the Marketplace on the 18th of January 2007, a whole month before the game gets released in America.

Never heard of Crackdown until now? Not a problem, Xbox.com has the details:

From Real Time Worlds, Crackdown pushes the action-driving hybrid genre into the next generation with the first ever truly 3-D playground. Level up your Agent’s strength, agility, firearms, explosives, and driving skills while scaling the fully vertical world of Crackdown. This M-rated game incorporates revolutionary co-op gameplay throughout the entire freeform campaign. Creat a volatile cocktail of judicial oppression and clean up the streets of a truly interactive world when Crackdown hits store shelves at an estimated retail price of $59.99.

Basically, it’s a mixture of RPG, Action, Driving and probably some influences from the GTA series, which is never a bad thing. Included in the demo will not only be obviously some single player action, but a nice chunk of co-op play as well, which is rather generous.

I’m pretty excited about this, since I love trying games before they are released like every other person out there. It’s also a day before my birthday, which is a nice early treat, something the guys at Microsoft quite obviously took into account when deciding when to release the content. Given the nature of the game, expect a pretty large download.

There is no mention of whether the download is region specific or not just yet, but hopefully Europe (and the rest of the world of course) will also get to sample the game come the 18th of January.

The game is set for release on the 20th of February Stateside. Also, since Major Nelson himself has confirmed the date of the demo, there is little chance of the demo being delayed.

Thanks SmileyDave for the initial heads-up, and thanks to IMI and Lotus 111s for submitting after I’d finished