True Crime: Streets of LA

"Look this one up under: “missed opportunity”"

I bought the GameCube version of “True Crime: Streets of LA” on release day, and despite the bad rap it has gotten from a lot of people (probably people who never even played the game for more than a few minutes), I had a blast with it. The voice actors, the story (well, some of the story) and the range of things you could do were really great. When I heard they would be doing a PC version of the game, but this time with more content and the addition of an online multiplayer mode, I placed my preorder right away.

Unfortunately, despite the large amount of time between the release of this version of the game and it's console predecessors, Luxoflux all but completely failed to improve on the original version. While there are many minor enhancements, there was so much room for improvement that if they had actually put the effort in, this could have been a must-have title.

I don't want you to get the wrong idea here, the PC version is clearly superior to the console versions when taken as a singular product. The graphics have been refined, there are more songs, more weapons, and a slew of other bonus content (primarily in the form of short videos and sequences that didn't make the console release).

But for the time being, let's assume that you don't know anything about the original console versions of this game, so that I can talk about it's core elements for a bit.

“True Crime: Streets of LA” has you playing as Nick Kang, a young cop who is hellbent on getting vengeance for the murder of his father. He is a combination of every stereotypical action movie star ever created, and indeed that is the point. True Crime was created to present the most cinematic experience possible. You are meant to feel like you are playing through a Hollywood action movie.

The backdrop of your little action movie will be the city of Los Angeles. But make no mistake, this is not a fictionalized and watered down version of the city; the world of True Crime takes place in 240 square miles of accurately reproduced LA. While the buildings don't look the same as they do in real life, every street is named and located as it is in real life, as well as all of the elevations taken from actual geographical maps. If you live in LA, you could literally take your favorite shortcuts you use around the city and apply them here to the game world.

While this recreated LA is one of the game's largest selling points, it has also been one of the largest sources of criticism. While all of the streets are accurate, the buildings that populate them are all very similar. There aren't a whole lot of different environmental models in the game, and they definitely get repetitive after you have been driving down a street for 10 minutes. The sheer size of the world is also a topic of hot debate. While it is incredible that they managed to get so much content into the game, it is almost too much; as it takes a very long time to drive from one side of the city to the other. You can use the highways to help you long distances, but even so, your vehicles top out at fairly low speeds.

So we know the world is huge, but how does it look? Graphically, True Crime can be a mixed bag. While the character models and animations are absolutely excellent (both in the PC and console versions), the rest of the game is not always so pretty. The buildings are passable (with the larger and more important ones looking generally better), as are most of the building interiors, but the majority of the car models are horrendous. The various cars that Nick himself drives (you unlock them as you progress through the game) are all very nice looking, but a few of the incidental vehicles that drive around the city literally look like Lego bricks. While I can certainly understand focusing the talents of your artists on the primary vehicles the player will be using, this borders on ridiculous. Perhaps there simply was not enough time to get all of the vehicle models up to par, but that is even more of a reason it should have been resolved for the PC version.

At any rate, what do you do in this overly large and occasionally crudely illustrated world? Well, there are quite a bit of things you can do at any given time. Unlike the GTA games, where you are free to take any mission at any time, True Crime is entirely linear. You do however have freedom to drive anywhere you like in the city in between missions, as you always chose when the next mission actually will start.

During this time you can go to various training facilities. There are training facilities for combat, driving, and shooting. Each one of these will not only increase your skill in the game, but will reward you with new moves in the respective fields of combat and driving, and new weapon augmentations. While you could get through the entire game without going to these training facilities, it would make things much more difficult.

While driving around the city there will also be random crimes reported on your vehicle's police radio. When you hear about a crime in progress, you can either ignore it and continue on with whatever you were doing, or actually go help. Going to resolve the crime will get you “badge points” which you can then use to trade for services (vehicle repairs, training, etc). It is therefore usually necessary to do at least some of these random crimes if you are to pursue any training.

While attempting to resolve a crime, you have many techniques at your disposal which are useful in various scenarios. For instance, if the crime is a simple fight, then using your vehicle's siren and flashing your badge will likely be enough to break things up and allow you to arrest those involved. If the crime is more serious, say a riot, then you might need to fire a warning shot into the air to get everyone's attention. Taking it farther, if you are dealing with something like a shootout with the police, then you might have no choice but to open fire on the suspects. Generally speaking, you want to resolve crimes without killing anyone, instead arresting the suspects in question. This however is not always possible, so you will have to know when to use lethal force.

Also, while roaming around the city you can frisk any person you see. This is a minor detail, but if you frisk someone who happens to be carrying something illegal, you will be rewarded with points.

Up until now I have not yet mentioned the Good Cop/Bad Cop system. Basically, if you do good deeds (solve random crimes, use non-lethal methods, etc) you are awarded “Good Cop” points. Do negative things (killing suspects, hitting bystanders, damaging property, etc) you will be given the opposite, “Bad Cop” points. Overall, the Good Cop/Bad Cop system has limited repercussions in the game. At a few points the storyline will branch depending on your current rating, but besides that the only effect is linked to the “Civil Unrest” meter. This is basically the “Wanted Level” from the GTA series; the more bad deeds you perform, the higher this meter goes. The public will start attacking you once you have proved yourself dangerous enough, and eventually the police force itself will turn on you. This is usually a one-way street, as there is no way to quickly drop the Civil Unrest meter besides trying in vain to do good deeds while everyone tries to attack you. Getting the Civil Unrest meter to the top is one of those things you do on purpose once, just to see what happens, and never actually have to deal with in the real game.

Once you have decided it is time to proceed with an actual mission, you simply drive to the location marked on your map. Going over the missions types briefly, you will generally either be tailing a suspect in your car, sneaking into a location, getting into a gun fight, or getting into a physical fight. While playing you cover a lot of grounds in terms of gameplay types, and it should be enough to keep you interested.

Finally, True Crime is really driven by the wonderful voice actors, including Russel Wong, Gary Oldman, Michael Madsen, and the incomparable Christopher Walken. All of the main voice actors deliver an absolutely stellar performance here, and are arguably one of the best features of the game. It really helps realize the cinematic feel the developers were going for.

However, the developers might have taken that concept a bit too far when it came time to write the actual storyline for the game. While I won't give anything away, I will say that it starts out excellent, gets a bit odd in the middle, and then takes a turn for the absolutely insane at the end. Perhaps I would be giving away too much if I revealed that by the end of the game, you will have fought an actual dragon?

Now that I have covered the core of what True Crime is, I would like to say a few things about the additions made to the PC version.

As I have said before, the graphics have definitely been brought up here. On the consoles the game suffered from a myriad of visual glitches and inconsistencies, and while they have not been totally resolved in the PC version, the situation is at least better.

In terms of the music, a number of new tracks where added for the PC version. While the original console versions focused mainly on west coast rap, the PC version augments this a bit with some rock as well. Since it still has all of the original songs, it can only be an improvement. Perhaps more importantly though, you now have the ability to change the current track, a feature that was painfully absent from the console versions.

While it does nothing for the actual game, I did enjoy the additional video content that comes with the game. It was all pretty inane, but it was funny, and gave a little insight into the backstory and character development process. It is something you would only look at once, but still a nice addition.

But never mind about all of that, here is the most important part of this review in my opinion; the online multiplayer. It is with the online multiplayer that this game completely misses the mark, and squanders the chance to create what could have been an absolutely excellent gameplay experience.

When the PC version was announced, I had dreams of what the online multiplayer could be. I thought perhaps they would take the Good Cop/Bad Cop concept online, and have persistent characters that we could team up with actual human partners and go through missions together. Or perhaps they would have multiple people in one full city, working together like a small police department, using teamwork to track down and arrest criminals, perhaps the criminals themselves would even be human players.

But no, instead they added on what has to be one of the most ill-conceived multiplayer modes the gaming world has ever known. It was so bad that on release day there were only 5 other people in the world playing it online in addition to myself.

The online multiplayer, in a nutshell, is just a hack of the single player game to allow 4 player controlled characters to be onscreen at once, and only that. The game cannot handle anything else happening when being played online, so forget about seeing AI controlled pedestrians or vehicles, it is just you and 3 other people. There are various modes of play, but they are all almost completely broken for one reason or another and are painfully glitchy. Just for the sake of completeness, I will cover the various modes, and also do you the kindness of telling you why they are terrible and why you should never play them.

The first mode is called “The Beat”. This mode sounds good on paper; it has you and the other players competing to solve random crimes, whoever solves the most crimes wins. This mode would be excellent if it was not for one issue that comes in all of the modes, the game cannot handle running the entire city during online multiplayer. So there is only ONE random crime at a time. That's right, you and 3 other players are competing to solve the exact same crime, at the exact same time. It does not take 4 people to subdue a mugger, in fact, 4 people trying to arrest the same person turns out to be horribly frustrating. It is almost completely impossible to enjoy this mode of the game with all 4 players; because whenever you try to arrest a suspect, one of the other players will just run in and shoot them. The only thing that counts in this mode are the “badge points”, so it doesn't matter how you solve the crime. Not only that, but there are also no other vehicles present in the city during this mode. So if the suspect steals your vehicle or it is destroyed, there is NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. Terrible.

The second mode is “Police Chase”. I must admit, this mode is actually enjoyable. The host chooses a player to be the “Suspect” and then the rest of the players are the police that need to chase him down. The person playing as the suspect has to lose the tailing police by getting far enough away from them for a certain amount of time. This mode can be a lot of fun if you are playing with a good group, and is not nearly as hindered by the lack of incidental vehicles as “The Beat” is.

There is also “Dojo Master” and “Battle Master”. These are both 4 player brawls, the first being with hand to hand combat and the second using guns. Both of these are completely ruined by the fact that the combat engine was never built for this many simultaneous players, let alone ones that were not AI controlled. “Dojo Master” matches generally consist of everyone running in circles trying to get into a position where they can actually hit another person. The “Battle Master” ones are pretty pointless as well, since it is just you and the other players on a level playing area shooting at each other, there is really no skill at all involved.

Finally, we have “Street Racing”. Is obvious the developers put the most time into this mode, as it offers a fair amount of options. You can chose from existing courses, or set waypoints to make your own anywhere in the city. You also have the option of enabling or disabling weapons, which help makes things more interesting. This mode would probably be fun if it were not for the random glitches in the game. During “Police Chase” it isn't so bad, but when you are in a street race and the person in 2nd place warps 3 blocks ahead of everyone else, it is sort of a downer. The lack of incidental vehicles also hurts here, as it removes what could have been a very interesting dynamic, trying to race through populated city streets; as it is you are simply racing through a ghost town.

All in all, I have to admit that I really do like True Crime as a game. It offers up a lot of gameplay, has a great cast of characters, and the storyline is unique (to say the least). But I can't help but feel cheated by the PC version. There was the chance here to really develop this game into something great with the addition of online multiplayer, but instead the developers just went for the “quick buck”. In fact, I would actually have rated this game higher if they had not even attempted to add in the multiplayer, but the sloppy job they did just brings down the entire experience.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/19/06