True Crime Streets of LA

True Crime: Streets of LA, from Activision, is a lot like your favorite teddy bear. His seems are coming loose and things really should be fixed, but you love him anyway. True Crime is an enormous and ambitious game, which pulls off a lot of what it tried to accomplish incredibly well, but there’s just no polish. Given another month or so of play testing and a little bit deeper story, this game could have been a masterpiece.

The game’s story is not very original; your father disappeared mysteriously and you are the reckless cop, Nick Kang, who gets the job done whatever the cost. The cost apparently was pretty high last time because you’re coming off a suspension at the beginning of the game. The police chief then convinces you to join a special squad to take down the Chinese Triad. Aside from a brief stint involving zombies, the story is adequate enough to get you to advance the plot, but you will by no means sit up at night wondering what’s going to happen next. The cool thing about the plot is that there are three different endings you can achieve, depending on your good cop/bad cop status at two separate junctures. Good cop points are awarded for arresting suspects or using neutralizing shots as opposed to killing the suspect outright. Killing innocents is also a good way to lose good cop points, so watch those sidewalks while driving.

True Crime’s gameplay has three separate modes. You will drive, shoot, and fight your way through pretty much every bad guy in LA. The driving should be familiar if you’ve played anything like Mafia or the GTA series before. The handling is a not at tight as it could be, but you get used to it quickly and it’s not an issue. The physics look great in car wrecks and when you hit anything on the highly destructible terrain. Your car takes considerably less damage from wrecks than it should, but you’ll be hitting a lot of cars, so be thankful. It seems odd that you can knock down trees with your car yet bounce off bushes, and this quirk becomes glaringly obvious paired with the fact that the bush sprite shows up at a much closer distance than anything else. It can be quite frustrating to get ready to cut a corner only to have a bush pop into existence and put a big dent in your shiny new commandeered vehicle.

When you’re not in the car, you have the option of either shooting or beating up your opponents. The good cop/bad cop rules apply here in particular. For instance, it is not okay to shoot someone who is just walking down the street violating parole, but if someone kidnapped a wealthy heiress and is shooting at you, feel free to end his life without penalty. Otherwise, you’ll have to either get them to give up by flashing your badge or shooting your gun into the air, or beat them into submission. Either method is considered “good” as long as they end up with cuffs on their hands and not dead. No one on the street will ever pose a large threat hand to hand, but if you happen to be without your guns equipped and the suspect opens up with his shotgun, don’t expect to survive. If you happened to win that particular fight, you can pick up your fallen enemies shotgun and use until you run out of ammo. Your default weapons are far from useless though; you come standard with dual pistols and unlimited ammo (all a good cop ever needs). Paying attention to how many rounds you have left is critical for gun fighting as the manual reload is much faster than automatic. Aside from that, the targeting system is for the most part smart enough that all you have to do is pull the trigger a lot and look cool doing it. Switching targets is not easy nearly as easy as it should be, but enemies go down quickly enough that it’s rarely an issue. By holding the fire button, you can enter a precision aiming mode that also slows down time. The effect is pulled off flawlessly and is invaluable in some of the harder end fights or when someone has taken a hostage. This is also where you can decide to kill (headshot) or neutralize (arm or leg) your enemy.

The hand to hand fighting is unfortunately not as well conceived as its shooting and driving counterparts. While the hint screens encourage you to pay attention to whether your enemy has a low guard or high guard up, the best method is really to just hit them as much as possible. 99% of the enemies in the game will not be a challenge to this method, but that other 1% is relatively impossible. The ill conceived mechanics don’t really show themselves until near the end of the game where you begin fighting better fighters. They’ll be able to block whatever you throw at them, regardless of the state of their guard, and it’s really just luck if you beat them. This is needlessly frustrating, and is disappointing compared to how fun the gunfights can be.

The game has a lot of little crimes for you to solve on the streets, which you’ll receive information on through the dispatch radio. These are highly varied and sometimes pretty funny. For instance, one such crime was that someone stole a truck of Activision games and the dispatcher warns you that the cargo is highly valuable. Solving these crimes awards you points that add up to “shields” which are the money of True Crime. You can use these shields to enter shooting ranges, dojos, and driving courses to upgrade your guns, fighting skills, and driving skills respectively. In the shooting range, you can get new guns, and new abilities like a quicker reload or the ability to target multiple enemies. The dojos offer new combos to use on stunned enemies and new grapples, but never anything that really makes you more effective as a fighter. The driving courses get you new car abilities like a skid stop or quick turn around, and also unlock new cars. Some of the upgrades are invaluable, especially getting new guns unlocked as they will make the gun battles much easier.

The graphics of True Crime are well done, sporting detailed character models and very slick animation. The destructibility of just about everything in the game looks great, and is usually interactive as well. For instance, if you break a stove, you can then set enemies on fire by knocking them into it. There is never any slowdown but that can easily be chalked up to the scarcity of traffic in LA, which seems a bit unrealistic. The only other problem is the aforementioned popping up of bushes, but there is little to complain about in the graphics department; True Crime is an excellent looking game.

The voice acting in True Crime is extremely well done. Christopher Walken is cast as the narrator and long time friend of your missing father. Walken’s voice doesn’t perfectly fit his character model, but his acting skills are easily worth the price. The other characters, Nick and the Chief in particular, are very well cast and go a long way to holding up the stale plot. The cutscenes are all done with the game engine and are well written. Nick comes off as a bit of a jerk at first, starting with him asking his new female partner to get him coffee, but Nick quickly becomes a likable character as the game progresses. That is, he would be likable if he wasn’t made to say the same semi-witty remarks every time anything happens. Some of the remarks are pretty funny the first time you hear them, but it is way overused and becomes quite annoying as you finish the game. It can also go a long way to ruin the mood if you’re racing against time to save someone’s life and Nick says something like, “this must be where all the cool kids hang out,” as you enter a building where you may find a dead friend, huge battle, or both. The sound effects are all very well done, and add a lot to the experience. For instance, if you’re fighting the street and a car hits you, it really sounds like it hurt. The soundtrack is also top notch. If you like rap, then you’ll probably really enjoy driving around and listening to the customizable radio. There’s some non-rap in there like the Deftones or Taproot, but for the most part, if you don’t like rap, you’ll have to turn it off.

True Crime feels like they tried to put too much into it. The entire city of LA is traversable, but really is just a novelty aspect, where that time could have been spent adding depth to the fighting or smoothing over some other aspect of the game. You’ll get that feeling a lot as you play through the game, wondering why they made bushes have the strength of reinforced steel or inserting zombies into the plot. But, you’ll also have a whole lot of fun playing the game. The shooting and driving mechanics are top notch and extremely fun. There’s nothing quite like going into precision aim mode and popping a tire on a speeding fugitive only to have him veer into two of his buddies that were firing at you. True Crime isn’t a terribly long game, but offers some replay value with the multiple endings and the fact that you can play any mission you’ve already beaten at any time. True Crime doesn’t have the polish it should, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have a great time playing it.