It's inevitable that this game will be compared to GTA: Vice City. And it's true. Making a game with so many similarities to another will do that. It's like reviewing ESPN NBA Basketball and never mentioning NBA Live. In any event, True Crime: Streets of LA borrows elements from many popular titles out, but the funny thing about that is - if you do it well, no one cares. Luckily for developer Luxoflux and publisher Activision, they did it well.
The story, which branches, depending on certain choices in the game, is basically that you are Nick Kang, a super cop with a bad attitude. As part of the E.O.D. (Elite Operations Division), you're assigned to tracking down a Russian and Chinese mafia syndicate. Basically, they're causing a ruckus, and you need to out-ruckus the ruckusseurs. Got it?
But let's not just focus on the Russians and Chinese. You're in LA - there are plenty of OTHER people to nab out here before going for the syndicate. As you receive orders, you'll have to zip back and forth through the 250 square miles of mapped and accurate Los Angeles streets and freeways. Sometimes, the orders have a time limit on them - get to the police station in 2 minutes, for example. But some orders are open-ended...show up at a Chinese restaurant, basically before Wednesday. So, once you're given control of Kang, you get to roam the streets freely. As an officer, you can make arrests, and in Los Angeles, it's a good idea. As you drive, crime and violence will break out around you, and it's your job to stop it as you see fit. This could mean solving it in a non-lethal way with punches and handcuffs. Or, it could just as likely mean solving crimes by mowing through a crowd with your car, storming them with a shower of bullets, or mowing through a crowd of people with your car AND gun.
This brings up the karma points. You'll see a Yin-Yang symbol in the lower portion of your screen, and it's not just there for feng shui. If you solve crimes with lethal force, you'll lose a point, dipping into negative numbers. If you solve a crime peaceably, you'll receive a point, cranking up the positive numbers. So, if you shoot 40 people right off the bat, you'll be at a -40. If you then solve 50 crimes peaceably, you'll be at +10. That's the beauty of the optional cruising time in the game - if you're falling into negative points and would rather be on the positive scale, you can cruise around and search civilians and stop crimes non-lethally, and receive points.
The story progression goes through twelve episodes, each with about 8 missions per episode. Missions can be as simple as "get from here to there," or as difficult as "use your handgun to kill the 400 armored terrorists that have seized the building." Missions are both on foot and in the car - and involve shooting, hand-to-hand combat and...well...creative driving. To give players more in these areas, there are training scenarios that the player can participate in (at the cost of one "shield" - the game's credit system-of-sorts). Upon completion of training scenarios, you are awarded with different abilities - combat skills like arm-breaking, shooting skills like dual-target aiming, and driving skills like peeling out. These upgrades are fairly crucial to you as you progress through the story. Sure, you don't HAVE to get them, but you'll find that it will be harder and harder to keep your head above water if you don't learn them. And you didn't know this was a swimming game?!
Okay. Now onto the important part - the game quality. The game is fun, and it's the simple fun that people liked in the GTA series. As one of GTA's developers said of his game, "It is Pac Man. The people are the dots you eat (run over) and the police the ghosts who chase you." Well, True Crime takes that idea and runs further with it. It's as if the people weren't just dots, but arrest able dots. In any event, the game has a simple fun to it, and the missions make it more fun.
What I don't find fun is the sea of graphical impairments that the game has. There is a lot of pop-up...as you're driving, things will appear out of nowhere in the distance (the N64 effect), and for some reason, it's showcased in the title screen demo movie. As for character models, there are only a small handful of them, so it's likely that you'll arrest "the same person" roughly six hundred times before the game is done. Same with cars - there are only a handful of cars, and you'll be sick of stealing Hummer H2s twenty minutes in. All this being said, the graphics do a fair job for the amount of "stuff" that is going on. There are generally ten independently-thinking AI characters on the screen, including drivers and pedestrians. If you fire a gun, people will run, people in cars will swerve around accidents and try to get away, etc.
And speaking of those people, one of the anomalies I didn't like was that people would walk directly into a fight, as if nothing were going on. Sometimes, crowds would gather while you duke it out with a criminal - and that was a nice touch. But sometimes, someone would wander in, whistling away, and a stray kick would land on their face. At that point, the newcomer would begin attacking you too. So now, instead of having one criminal to defeat, you've got two. In crowded neighborhoods, this could happen three times in one fight, leaving you with FOUR people to neutralize. If you shoot them, you lose karma points - if you don't, they'll surround you and you'll lose a shield. What's a girl to do!?
Sound wise, the game is a good deal. A warning to the young and Christian - there is a lot of cursing in this game. Accidentally shoot a pedestrian and you're greeted with Kang yelling "S**T - damn that itchy trigger finger." If you get shot, it's just plain old' "S**T." Sometimes, you'll even hear a "motherf***er" from a criminal. I was shocked. The soundtrack is unedited as well, so you will sometimes roll down the streets to the chorus "I...don't roll...with no B***H A*S N*****S." Excuse the asterisks, but this is a family review, folks. The excitement of an unedited game has its ups and downs. Clearly a game for adults, its high time adults aren't penalized for irresponsible parents not keeping their kids away from violent and inappropriate games. But at the same time, if you're not a fan of unedited hip hop music, you may wear thin quickly. Luckily, you can turn the tunes off or down. This brings me to my next point of lament: the music. Oh, I appreciate some of the tracks - in fact, damn near all of them. But I didn't HEAR all of them. You'll hear some Snoop Dogg, Westside Connection, Bone Thugz N' Harmony, Lil 1/2 Dead, E40, and other greats, BUT - the tracks play in order on missions, so many times you'll get halfway through Parliament Funkadelic's "Flashlight," just to hear it again.
So, aside from the randomization of tunes, which would benefit the game tenfold, there's another music-related problem. Everyone's car is playing hip hop. If you steal a Cadillac in Compton, it's hip hop. If you steal a Mercedes in Beverly Hills, it's hip hop. If you steal an armored truck at the Santa Monica airport, it's hip hop. If you somehow steal the SWAT team's armored vehicle, that's got hip hop on the radio as well. Solution? "Borrow" the idea of stations from GTA: Vice City. There's easily enough hip music to throw on a few radio stations. Hell, I would just settle for a few non-hip hop tunes thrown in. It seems like there are 4 or 5 non-hip hop songs in there, (like tracks by Adema, the abovementioned Parliament, and oddly enough, Megadeth), but they never seem to come up. Not that I'm harping on realism for this game, because that's not my desire, I'd just like for the music to be more varied. And would it have killed them to include more songs about California or LA? The west coast hip hop tradition IS Los Angeles - you never hear hip hop songs about Seattle or Portland. Anyway, I'm straying off course, so I'm done on this topic.
In case you're large-paragraph phobic, the basic idea is that the sound and graphics are both...well...there. But a little more attention should have been paid to both.
The story and game play? Fun. Tough. Worth it.
Is it a rehashed GTA: Vice City? Kind of. Nope, not really.
Should I buy it? Sure, if you're over 18.
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