And yes, the environments effectively sucked. Rows and rows of the same general building styles, one after another. Cars and other vehicles that lacked any real eye-candy or glitz to draw my attention. Poor looking terrain, with trees and shrubbery that made me want to gouge my eyes out. Even the environmental interaction was terrible – running into trees or fences caused the objects to fly out, get stuck on the hood of my car, and then magically vanish a few seconds later. I think a lot of the problems with the terrain was that the game was designed with a console in mind, not a PC – hello, I do have more than 32MB of RAM, thank you very much, so give me some fucking detail. In any case, one thing that keeps the driving segments from being totally boring are random missions, or rather, “street crimes”. As you’re cruising around minding your own business, calls will randomly pop up regarding everything from drunk drivers to meat cleaver-wielding cannibals running loose on the streets. Players have the choice of other ignoring these calls, or going in to check them out and gain “badge points”, which are the basic economy in True Crime. At the player’s disposal to apprehend those no-good hoodlums are a police badge, gun, and of course handcuffs. Criminals will react differently based on some random variables when the street crime mission is generated, so while driving up with your car’s siren (if it has one) blaring and pushing the “Warning Shot” button to shoot your gun into the air may be enough to scare most crooks into surrendering, some may take offense and pull out their own weapons in an attempt to blow your head off, while others will pull a knife and try to beat the crap out of you, or just take off running and eventually carjack somebody, never to be seen again. This randomness adds quite a bit of intrigue to the random missions (sometimes bad guys will even appear to surrender, but will suddenly turn hostile when you get close), but it only takes so long for the same missions to be seen over and over again, so even this devolves into something players will find themselves simply not wanting to do after some time.

Ah yes, badge points. Throughout LA, there are stations where badge points can be spent. Hospitals will rejuvenate Nick’s health, while gas stations can be used to instantly repair a vehicle. Of even more interest though are the “24/7” shops scattered all over the place, the use of which is indicated on the player’s radar when he gets close. Gun ships can be used to obtain new, better pistols for Nick’s arsenal or give his existing weapons new abilities, like a laser sight or flashlight (which aren’t nearly as versatile as one would expect). Martial Arts buildings can educate Nick on new combo attacks or special abilities. Finally, there are driving courses available that will let the player learn some new driving techniques that give sudden bursts of acceleration or force an enemy vehicle to spin out when hit just right. I really liked the concept of spending my hard-earned badge points for these progressive upgrades, though after some time I felt that they became redundant and just didn’t do anything to help me. The martial arts combos in particular were hardly something I found useful – maybe I’m just a moron, but I noticed that my cheesy “Leaping Monkey” special attack (or whatever) was just as effective as some of the more convoluted maneuvers I learned later on. The combo system is so hard to use effectively anyways that I commonly ended up resorting to just punching people in the face until they fell down and begged for mercy, once I got sick of having the game blatantly ignore my input keystrokes after an opponent had been dazed.

So, overall, the singleplayer campaign ends up being only mediocre. While I’ve seen games do far worse, this game is a lot lower down the quality ladder than it should be. At the least, there’s a decent amount of content, and the random street missions and extensive “episodes” will probably keep some players entertained for a little while, but most will probably just run back to GTA3. However, True Crime does happen to ship with a multiplayer component that the development team appears to have put some half decent effort into, so I booted it up out of curiosity to check things out. I only found a single match going during my trial session, running a game mode called “The Beat”. In “The Beat”, players are placed throughout a specific area of the city and challenged to solve random street crimes and get the most number of badge points (or the highest number of “Good Cop” points) before the timer expires. Sounded like a blast, so after selecting my character model, vehicle type, and punching in my personalized license plate (“Antaeus”), I connected to the server and waited for launch. Multiplayer games can apparently only support up to four players, which surprised me given the amount of gameplay possible from this title with the huge size of the city, popularity of broadband gaming networks in this day and age, and the huge success of various third-party multiplayer modifications for GTA3/Vice City, but even a strict 4 player limitation isn’t enough to save True Crime’s multiplayer element. The game I played was incredibly bad, as not only did my framerate keep strangely bouncing all over the place, but other vehicles kept teleporting around randomly, some really strange physics crap kept happening, and the experience as a whole felt really buggy and very, very shoddy. On the theory I had perhaps joined a bad server, I dug around and found complaints from numerous other people annoyed by the same things I was. Perhaps this would make a fun LAN game, but I think True Crime’s potential as an online title is effectively screwed simply because the network engine isn’t capable of handling this game. If a patch is released to resolve these blatant problems and increase the player limit, I may give multiplayer a second look, but only if. I think if I really want a carjacking multiplayerfest, I’ll just go install Vice City again and hunt down one of the popular multiplayer patches.

I’m been saving up a big rant on True Crime’s graphics engine, but maybe I’ll just save everyone some grief by summarizing things. True Crime’s graphics are, in a word, terrible, and hardly fulfilling of the standards demanded by today’s gamer. I already mentioned this earlier, but the game constantly feels the need to remind me of how much of a console port it is in an obvious manner by making objects disappear as soon as I turn my back, having a terrible visibility distance (objects literally fade into few a few feet away, such as fences or signposts – it’s like I’m driving through a thick fog, except there isn’t any actual fog), an uninspiring array of backdrops, and to top it all off, I ended up with inconsistent framerates. After examining this problem a little further, I realized the game kept slowing down because it was literally throwing essential data in and out of memory on the fly while I was moving – sometimes I would be driving so fast that I would reach a scene before it finished loading, and the game would practically slow to a crawl until it finished. Geesus christ, there’s plenty of RAM to go around damnit, make use of it! Even the special effects are terrible – when a vehicle reaches critical damage, the explosion sprites are some of the worst I’ve ever seen – I think even Doom had better explosive effects. As a final kick to the groin, the game crashed on me every time I tried to alt-tab out. Nitpicky perhaps, but I thought I’d pile that on there.

And how about the sound aspect? I can’t really comment on the utterly huge torrent of music tracks included with the game other than to say that some will probably love the focus on rock themes, and others will simply kill the music and run WinAMP in the background. On the subject of voice acting, the actor portraying Nick Kang did a pretty bang-up job with his lines – it’s just the dialogue itself that is corny. Hearing Nick shout off the same commentary at the start of a mission (“Okay LA, here I come!”) got tiresome, fast. The supplementary cast also did their jobs pretty nicely, with Christopher Walken handling narrative duties in a great manner, and there’s even an assortment of differing pedestrians the player will run into that have their own decently-spoken lines (I think I even heard the same guy who did Troy McLure from The Simpsons several times). Yesiree, I have no qualms with the voice talent used at all, just the deployment of the spoken lines. Believe me, you’ll want to punch Nick in the face too after he whines for the 20th time about his car not having any more “personality” while being fixed. Some of the random dialogue gets played out at perfect times and ends up being hilarious, but this doesn’t happen nearly often enough to be enjoyable. Another annoyance with the game audio – the game’s cutscenes kept going out of sync with the spoken dialogue and sound effects (making me think it was just crudely linked to a streaming audio file like some games do). Chalk up another one for the testing division?

True Crime: Streets of LA just isn’t a game I can suggest to any kind of self-respecting gamer. Anybody trying to choose between this and Grand Theft Auto 3 and/or Vice City should obviously go for the latter, and then be swiftly beaten for not owning either of those two titles already. There just isn’t enough punch in this game to make it last in today’s hardcore gaming market – the huge city is hardly exploited for all it could be, the combat and navigation is fairly dull, uninspiring, and even rips off other games (I’m not referring to the “slow down time” thing itself, but how blatantly some of the maneuvers borrow from Max Payne and mix in with the half-assed bullet time), the storyline and gameplay is generic (at one point, zombies are actually introduced – ZOMBIES!), and not even the multiplayer is capable of redeeming this game thanks to bugs and shoddy performance. If you’ve ever wanted to play through a Jackie Chan movie in game format, this may arouse your interest, and I’m sure there’s a variety of people who have never played anything better that will pick up True Crime regardless and enjoy it to some extent, but as I said, I seriously cannot recommend this title given the competition it is up against. Definitely a “pass”.