When I first saw about True Crime I said to myself “Self, this should be a good game. It looks like the bastard child of Grand Theft Auto and Dead to Rights.” Now, for those who know me know I have an affinity to games in which you drive, shoot, whump-up on baddies and just cause general discord. Considering that this game had Driving (in a real-time LA), shooting, beating and a story I knew it couldn’t be all that bad. Really, though, how well did Luxoflux (a fairly young company) do with this over-hyped foray? Well, just keep reading to find out.

You are Nick Kang. You are the baddest mother on the planet…almost. As a cop for the LAPD you were a bit of a loose cannon and had your badge revoked but when the opportunity arises to get back on the streets under the umbrella of the E.O.D. – Elite Operations Divisions – you just couldn’t jump at the chance fast enough. How the story unfolds from there is entirely up to you. Not like Knights of the Old Republic or Fable for Xbox, but in that you can choose to complete missions or skip ahead in the story to progress. There are three paths to follow and only one leads to the true and final ending. With a fairly deep and engrossing story so full of characters (some more colorful than others), and with more plot twists than a David Lynch film, the game will keep you playing for hours. Nick’s path is not one of ease, nor one of pleasure. There are going to be some points in the story where you will begin yelling at the screen saying “No! No! Damn youse! Damn youse all to Hell!” The men, women and children over at Luxoflux did a damn fine job of integrating story, and cliché as the story may have bee, it’s classic and timeless cop drama. I shall not reveal more than previously mentioned in the ways of story if for nothing else than it’s part of what makes the game so damn fun. If you want to know about Nick and his dealings with the scum of LA, well, you’ll just have to play for yourself.

And just think – this is one of the first things you do in the game.

The missions throughout the game are fairly standard. You have a set mission but how you go about reaching the goal is left pretty free. Driving missions have two modes: Drive to a location or Drive to a location in a certain amount of time. In the mission without time limit you are free to cruise the streets of LA and take in the sights or listen on your police scanner for reports of “street crimes” which you can stop for points and the general well-being of the city. For stopping street crimes peacefully (peacefully meaning opening a can of whoop-ass on a perp but not killing them) you are awarded Shield points. For every 100 Shield points you receive you are able to enter a 24/7 stop, but I’ll come back to them. In addition to gaining Shield points your Good Cop/Bad Cop rating will go more toward the positive. If you kill pedestrians or shoot a criminal before being shot at you will receive a deduction from your total. It is extremely wise to keep a high “Good Cop” level; otherwise your actions will cause a great deal of dissension amongst the city and the citizens – as well as the police. And if you keep on your dark path they will come after you – police and citizens alike. Whilst playing a non-timed driving mission you can exit your vehicle any time you please and walk the streets frisking citizens for drugs or weapons. If the person you frisked is found holding you will receive a positive mark for being a Good Cop and some Shield points, but if they are found without anything a fight may erupt. The timed missions, however, are the real stone-breakers in the game. With a true to life map of LA you have to navigate your way through the while avoiding other traffic and not hitting any bystanders. For most of the timed missions there are only a few paths that will get you to your destination within the time limit. Once again, screaming at the set and even possible throwing of controller can ensue. The great part about them is the immense satisfaction you feel when you finally beat the mission and rescue the person in distress…or you find them hanging from the ceiling of a warehouse, but I digress. As for the 24/7 missions, well, they are an assortment of upgrades you can earn. You can select hand combat training, shooting training to gain better shots or weapons, or street races for better cars. Personally, I enjoyed the LAPD shooting missions in which you would gain new weapons or new types of shots, in addition to the funny commentary from the officer working in the shooting gallery voiced by the timeless Christopher Walken. In playing you will come to learn that the 24/7’s are your best friends and the only way to survive through the later missions. Solve the street crimes and get those shields In addition to the driving missions there are straight up fighting missions. Much like driving, there are two types of fighting missions. There are guns and weapons battles and there are straight up hand-to-hand combat battles. Each have their respective ups and downs, but suffer from some control issues, which I shall discuss shortly. The weapons combat is just some mad serious fun. A certain mission takes place within a Russian spa…it’s a fairly confined area and all you see is bullets flying from every direction with plaster and marble breaking from the walls and pillars, much like the lobby shooting spree in the first Matrix film. The action is just so intense during the missions you get really worked up and feel as though you are right there in the heat of battle and then when you emerge victorious, or should I say if you emerge victorious, you are welcomed back to reality by a very bad, cheesy line/pun spouted by our own Nick Kang. The hand-to-hand combats missions are also fun, but lesser so. Not that they aren’t interesting. The cunning use of martial arts practice certainly aids in the overall presentation and adds to the realism, but I just didn’t feel it really went with the tone of the game. Lest we forget more control issues, but that’s another story I’ll touch on in a bit. As a whole, I really can’t complain too much about the mission variety or set-up. They can test your skills and make you mad, but the greatness of intense shooting and fighting makes up for the frustration.


It’s times like these when you just really enjoy shooting everything that moves.
I guess you’d like to know about the controls then, eh? I know I’d said they had some issues, and, well, sorry Luxoflux, but they did. I found there to be very, very serious issues with the rotating camera while on the street. In battle the camera works just fine, but on the streets it becomes almost impossible to rotate the camera around nick to gain a favorable vantage. Furthermore, during the hand-to-hand combat, I found it quite terrible to press the buttons…and they not do anything. I would press A, A, B, Y, A, B and it wouldn’t register the Y (jump kick) attack. I understand that it does add a little realism into the fact that you can’t go straight from punch and kick into a raging jump kick, but still, you shouldn’t have to step back and wait for all actions to cease in order to use it. My qualm with the controls during weapons combat was that often times the X button would not be responsive to pick up a dropped weapon from a baddie and during intense fire-fights like the aforementioned spa battle it became quite the annoyance. Driving controls, however, are just about perfect. It took a little adjustment to using B as brake and not L, but you learn that pretty fast after about the seventh time you’ve rolled out of a car clipping along at 65. Naturally each car has their own type of handling and speeds and the controls are perfectly responsive and intuitive. Shooting while driving is also a breeze by either using the auto aim in close proximity to the target or by holding in the R shoulder to zoom in and go into a Max Payne style “bullet-time” shooting, where everything slows down to a crawl yet you can aim in real time. The zoom-in function becomes so much more fun when you gain upgrades like the laser-sight and fast shot. Aside from a few issues of unresponsive buttons I really can’t complain too much about the controls. I never did understand why it took Nick so long to break into a run after holding forward on the stick, but oh well.

And what’s a game nowadays without graphics. In parts the graphics were quite splendid and in others I wanted to hide my face away in my pillow and cry. The character models were quite lovely. I would assume they were a scan of a real person, but they may have been hand-tooled. Either way, they were just awesome. Characters had amazingly animated faces and none of the Resident Evil/Silent Hill “Zombie Eyes.” They even had a big poufy Afro (well, one of them did). The cars, while looking very pretty on the outside, looked like complete and total ass on the inside. If I didn’t know better I would have assumed that they took car interior from a PSX game. It seemed as though that was the theme for the whole game – detail and texture was extremely muddied and bland. Eternal Darkness suffered the same fate of having undefined and muddied textures. The overall appearance was soothing, much like that of Atari’s Enter the Matrix, but not the most astonishing thing I’d ever seen. It certainly wasn’t Knights of the Old Republic, but it was better looking than most games. Aside from the textures, I really can’t complain. It’s more of an issue of you have to see it for yourself to make your own judgment on it.


Brotherly love at it’s finest.
The sound (and soundtrack) is amazing. I mean, there’s not much of a better way to explain it than that. I can’t say I loved all the soundtrack, in fact I disliked quite a bit, but the glorious part is that the option to shut off songs from the three soundtrack sets was included. Much like Custom Soundtrack on Xbox, you could pick and choose which of the songs you wanted to hear. Being the best song on the whole game I set all my driving music to Snoop Dogg’s “Dance With Me.” With some of the biggest names in hip-hop and rock, a soundtrack like this has only been outdone by the infamous Grand Theft Auto. If this is the wave of the future, I am welcoming the future with open arms. The actually sound itself is just top-notch. Both stereo and surround work perfectly and project loud and clear. I was actually quite astonished by the stereo setting of the sound. I was far more impressed with its quality than the surround. Not that the surround was bad, far from it, but the stereo was just that good. Voice acting was superb and some of the dialogue and jokes were really, well…crappy but funny. It’s really hard to go wrong with Walken, and the game is worth at least a rental if for nothing else than to hear his speech when you earn a new gun. Classic.

As a whole I really enjoyed my True Crime experience. I enjoyed the fact that I could just go back and replay the missions I enjoyed. I love being able to pick up the game for a few minutes and go cruising the West Coast to solve some crimes. I fully appreciated the direction that this game took when compared to GTA and that it took the side of the cop preventing and stopping crime rather than creating it. You approach things in a semi-non-violent way. Not non-violent like Dr. Martin Luther King, but you are penalized for shooting an offender when a simple hand-cuffing would do. Violent as it may have been there was still a sentiment of peace and good to it all knowing that you were the police, not the criminal. You were the hero making a difference in the world and protecting the rights of those around you. With an amazing soundtrack, decent controls and just a whole heckamessa fun to fall back on, True Crime surely is a game many of you should own – if you like those type of games, though. If they aren’t your cup of tea (or you’re GCC co-owner Carl DeNovio) and hate all things rap/hip-hop you should stay far away because you won’t take any pleasure from it.

And what other game can you play as legendary rapper Snoop Dogg?