"No...not even for $2.70"

I buy a lot of cheap games out of the Gamestop bargain bin and off eBay, so many my apartment is piled high with them. Often, I'm pleasantly surprised at the gameplay you get for well under $10 bucks. This time...no. Not even for $2.70.

True Crime: Streets of LA sets itself up as a GTA III style game, with free roaming over a large area (in this case, a painstakingly constructed street map of Los Angeles). The reconstruction of Los Angeles is the best part of the game, and all in all, it is pretty neat. If I ever need to drive in LA in the future, I might put this in and scope out a path to my destination for kicks, though I'm sure some streets have changed since the game was made, and I'm quite sure there won't be so little traffic. Unfortunately, this is really the only positive and recommending feature of this game, and in the end, it doesn't actually matter.

The reason the gigantic, free-roamable L.A. doesn't matter, is that in the vast majority of the missions you're put through, you're not even in the city, but in buildings or underground. Oh, sure, there are "driving missions", which basically end up being, "go from here to there in under this amount of time". No one's interfering with you, you've just got to make it through traffic from one side of LA to the other. They're either laughably easy, or cut so close it's impossible to complete them without a very fast car. As a bonus, if you neglected to be driving said fast car when you arrived at the previous mission's end, you're out of luck, and are going to have to replay the last few missions in order to be there with a car fast enough to get you through. There are also "tailing" missions, in which you've got to keep a certain distance behind the mark you're tailing without getting too far away or too close. Now, you're technically tailing whomever around an accurate recreation of L.A., but because the range of allowable distances is so small, you end up navigating by watching the red dot on your mini-map almost exclusively. How realistic!

The only other way you interact with the city map are dealing with the various, randomly generated crime missions that pop up as you travel through, much like the ones that happen in Spider-man 2, and Ultimate Spider-man. These are unfortunately, very poorly implemented. The developers apparently are of the "every ability must have a separate button combination" school as opposed to the school of sensible things like context sensitivity, which makes trying to pull off complex non-lethal methods far more difficult than they ought to be. There are also purported features that I've never once gotten to work right, like shooting your gun in the air to scare perps into surrendering. I got it to work once while I was standing in the middle of the street, but trying to do it against an actual perp never worked at all. Most of the time trying resulted in shooting the gun randomly or kicking an innocent bystander that had walked in front of me. Another poorly thought out system is the "karma" system, which allows you to choose between being a "good cop" and a "bad cop". Unfortunately, the developers apparently think shaking down every single person on the street at random counts as being a good cop. You can build up a huge reserve of "good karma" by simply walking all the way to your destination and shaking down every pedestrian en-route. No one will get angry and shoot you (unless you miss and accidentally punch them, which is way too easy to do), there are no cops walking the street, and none of the grannies or scantily clad prostitutes ever bother to use the assault rifles you find secreted in their purses or g-strings.

Every other mission than those are inside, and have nothing at all to do with the "streets of L.A." There are three types, hand-to-hand fights, gunfights, and "stealth" missions. I put "stealth" in quotes, because stealthy apparently means "not being directly in front of someone for longer than three seconds, and not walking on obvious piles of broken glass" in Los Angeles. No wonder they make so many movies there. Each of these three mission types is almost exactly the same every time you encounter one, only the geography of the level you do it in is different, a gimmick thrown in every so often. The fights are so easy it's hard to lose, and the controls are so bad, they probably seriously dialed down the difficulty in order to prevent people from being frustrated with them. Grand Theft Auto wasn't exactly the king of responsive control, but compared to this, it might as well be Tekken.

The audio side is a mixed bag. The track list included in the game is quite extensive, with a lot of what appear to be new and remixed songs, most of them OK if you appreciate gangsta rap or West Coast new wave metal. Sound effects and voices (other than the big name voice actors) range from bland to bad, however. And while the track list is extensive, there are no GTA-esque radio stations for you to pick your favorite type. There's apparently only one radio station on the streets of L.A., and it's always on.

As for the story, at best it starts out bland and uninteresting. Son of a cop framed for being dirty joins the force to try and find out what happened to his dad. There are some good voice actors (like Christopher Walken and Gary Oldman to name just two) but their contribution to the game is almost non-existant, so it doesn't really end up being much of a net positive. Then a little more than halfway through, you start fighting zombies and demons in a mine under L.A. Yeah, you read that right, zombies and demons. This is pretty much where I checked out. I couldn't tell you what the rest of the story was, because I just didn't pay any attention and skipped it all from that point on. I mean, if the writers so obviously didn't care, why should I? Not when the very next enemy is several packs of flame beholders spawned from the lava pits beneath LA, followed by tattooed demon strippers, and of course the obligatory subterranean Chinese dragon fight. I really draw the line at the flame beholders in a cop drama. The rest of it is just icing on the awful cake.

All in all, as I write this, I'm disappointed that I didn't spend the $2.70 I paid for this game on a big can of Red Bull. I suggest that the next time you're presented with the choice of True Crime: Streets of L.A., or a can of Red Bull, you learn from my mistakes and pick the Red Bull.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 04/02/08

Game Release: True Crime: Streets of LA (US, 11/03/03)