Take Grand Theft Auto 3, mix in a copy of Max Payne, add a little seasoning and your average Jackie Chan movie, and what will you get? Probably a destroyed blender and the total destruction of several game discs and movie DVDs – or at least, that’s what I ended up with. Fortunately, the mailman stopped by with my copy of True Crime: Streets of LA, narrowly averting my attention from the disaster brewing in my kitchen.

True Crime: Streets of LA puts one “Nick Kang” in the spotlight as the protagonist as your average cliché “out of control against all odds and YOU’RE OFF THE CASE BECAUSE YOU’RE A LOOSE CANNON” kind of cop – except he’s also partially Chinese and happens to be carry superhuman skills of martial arts ass-kicking. Suspended from the Los Angeles police force due to crazy acts of abuse and force, Nick Kang is quickly called back into service when a triad group begins making trouble. Enter the “E.O.D.” – the “Elite Operations Division”, a specialized police group that Nick’s wild shooty-shooty antics are perfect for. And that’s the basic wrap-up; after insulting his partner by mistaking her for a secretary, Nick heads into LA to try and deliver a swift kick in the beanbag against crime, and snap off a bunch of corny one-liners while doing so.

I’ve never actually played True Crime in its console forms prior to its new release on PC, so bear with me when I state that this article will more focus on how the game actually stacks up as a PC title, rather than the new features it brings over from the console market. And to be honest, True Crime: Streets of LA really isn’t an astonishingly memorable game. Oh sure, it’s decent and has an underlying level of charm that was difficult to ignore when I started playing, but tedium, grief, and boredom soon took over to make me realize why everyone kept telling me that this game really wasn’t all that great. Why? Read on to find out.

The game’s singleplayer campaign is effectively a linear story with some basic non-linear elements. What I mean is that, while everything you do in the game inevitably links to the “next level” and, eventually, the ending of the game, the player’s actions throughout the campaign can slightly affect how the outcome is, to eventually finish with one of three possible endings. Still, a lot of the action is scripted in such a way that only one real approach will lead to the completion or failure of an objective, so there isn’t really room for any flexibility. Cutting down on the immersion and feeling of progression is the interesting note is that, unlike Grand Theft Auto 3, each and every mission in the game is accessible through the main menu, and several points have the player using this menu to select which path he’ll take (if he wants to veer off on a “side episode”, play a bonus mission, or simply continue the game normally). I suppose taking the GTA3 approach to things (which lets the player explore the city totally on his own will and play missions only when he feels like it) would have made the game feel like far too much more of a rip-off than it already is, but the whole menu approach still didn’t really feel right. As it stands, progression through the game involves whisking the player off through one mission after another, with no real opportunity for downtime or exploration beyond uneventful “Driving To...” segments or certain bonus levels.

This turns out to be less of a bad thing than it should be, but only because there’s basically nothing to do. Los Angeles is detailed quite nicely in the game, but it is also incredibly huge, which hampered exploration – if I spend hours looking for something, chances are I’d also have to spend hours finding my way back. And aside from some ramps and vague pick-ups that I never really bothered to track down (items akin to GTA3’s “hidden packages”), there honestly wasn’t any incentive I could find to go exploring. While the cities in GTA3 and Vice City were large, they were also somewhat contained and easy to memorize and navigate. In True Crime, I commonly ended up with the blind feeling of just cruising up and down streets at random until I found a way to my next mission waypoint. Huge really doesn’t equate to quality unless you have some motive to get players exploring, something totally lacking in True Crime.

So what about the ability to affect endings, and the non-linear aspects of the story, vague and small however they may be? Alas, there really isn’t all that much. Which of the three endings to the game players get appears to be affected only by the “good cop/bad cop” rating, which is a mind-numbingly easy value to change and is more down to player decision than actual skill. Do I shoot a guy in the face and get a “bad cop” point, or shoot him in the knees and get a “good cop” point? Do I sneak up behind someone and simply knock them out with a smacking, or use a hefty kick to snap their necks? That’s pretty much the extent of it – running over pedestrians or killing innocents will usually net you a “bad cop” point, but, depending on which direction you want to take, this is something that can be easily resolve. The only other non-linear aspect is the ability to get alternate missions, which will sometimes occur if you fail to achieve an objective, but since you can still beat the mission normally and access the “ALT” mission through the menu regardless, the entire process feels a bit pointless, especially since most players will probably just retry the mission rather than accept a failure.

As I’ve said repeatedly, the game definitely has a half-decent storyline resembling that of an action-based B-movie, but the gameplay resulting from this filters down into a number of repetitive, basic mission types. There’s the “Drive To...” missions I mentioned earlier that give players the chance to check out the town a bit, or just drive straight to the designated waypoint to continue the game. There are “Escape” missions, where the player has been ambushed and has to get in his car and drive the hell away before he’s ass-raped by hired goons, “Follow” missions, where a player has to try to tail somebody without getting too close – or too far, “Race” missions which challenge the player to reach a destination before the timer expires, and simple action segments, where a target has to be chased down and have the crap beat out of him until he surrenders. Several missions also take place indoors, but almost always follow the same rhythm. A stealth opening, where Nick Kang has to try to sneak past guards (forced stealth missions almost always elicit a big groan from the gaming side of my brain, but these are so ridiculously easy that I was able to blow through most of them with my crazy Splinter Cell/Metal Gear Solid training), followed up by some kung-fu action, where Nick has suddenly been discovered and elects to beat the crap out of his assailants, and then finally a shoot-out, where the pistols come out and mass destruction commences. While the settings and enemies were always different, the action and gameplay itself was TERRIBLY repetitive and became dull almost immediately.

Let’s delve a little more into the action parts of the game. I already went over sneaking – you waltz around, get behind the inept guards, and then either hit one button to knock them unconscious, or another button to kill them. This continues until you reach the marked “exit point’. Whee! Melee combat consists of using three buttons to initiate three different attacks to try and beat the crap out of your opponents. Every time you hit an NPC, a draining indicator will appear showing how much more the enemy needs to be slapped around before he is briefly “dazed”, giving you the opportunity to either grab and throw him, or pull off a super-move (done by entering combos using the attack buttons). Finally, the shoot-outs just involve blindly firing at anybody crazy enough to come at you. Nick’s pistols have unlimited ammo (limited clips prompt an occasional pushing of the “reload” button, however), but dropped enemy weapons can be picked up for more damage at the cost of battle endurance – when the guns run dry, they’ll be dropped and the pistols come out again. A neato dual-wielding system allows for two differing enemy weapons to be carried at once (say an Ak-47 and a shotgun), but the action still eventually boils down to aiming at an enemy and pushing the fire button blindly until he dies. One neat trick that can be done is precision aiming, which can be done by holding down the fire button. Doing this actually slows time down briefly and causes a crosshair to appear which can be positioned over enemies to fire at specific parts of their body. Oh, and Nick can also do a flying leap to the left or to the right while firing his guns and slowing down time – an exact maneuver I’m positive I’ve seen used somewhere before, but I’ll be damned if I can remember where. *Cough*

So aside from a neat manual aiming system, the indoor segments are a little corny and rehashed. How about the driving? Hopping in a speed-mobile to rip up the streets of LA and bust some punk-ass bitches sounds like a real blast, doesn’t it? Not in True Crime, thanks to the half-assed driving physics and relatively boring environment. I’m not sure what it was exactly, but compared to GTA3 the vehicles in True Crime just didn’t really feel very good. The handling seemed really shoddy, and the vehicles felt like they lacked detail. Hell, looking closely at Nick every time I took a heavy turn revealed that his hands didn’t even turn with the steering wheel, something I’m pretty certain older games have been doing for a very long time now. Maybe I’m nit-picking, but since my own vehicle was the most interesting thing I had to look at most of the time while driving, this sort of thing tended to stand out a lore more.