User Rating: 3.9 | True Crime: Streets of LA PS2
By tubedogg | Review Date:
True Crime had a great premise and a lot of promise, but ultimately failed to live up to its' expectations. The absolute first thing that is wrong with this game is graphics issues. In the intro movie (which, by the way, took an inordinate amount of time to load) there were framerate issues left and right. Once in the game, the graphics are pretty stable (although I noticed some clipping issues occasionally) but later cut-scenes exhibit the same frame stuttering that plagues the opener. There is absolutely no excuse for choppiness in a cut-scene on the Xbox. The overall graphics look of the game is also not much better than GTA3 for the PS2 - jagged edges galore, rather blocky character models, textures that aren't very hi-res, etc. Sound is pretty top-notch, with recognizable voices from some of the characters. Ambient sound is used well. Voices during fights (which happen *a lot*) are extremely repetitive and detract from an otherwise impressive area. Gameplay is ultimately where this game tanks. While the branching story lines will add some replay value, the game is simply too easy. After playing the game for approximately four hours, I am two missions (there are six to eight missions in each episode) away from beating the Bad Cop branch. I am by no means a better-than-average gamer, yet I'm going to beat the game in five to six hours?!? This leads to another issue, which is repetitiveness. GTA3 was criticized for being repetitive by some people, but it still had missions that were unique enough to where you didn't feel like you were doing the same things over and over again. TC:SLA is a complete other story. Every episode consists of the following mission structure: one to two "drive around the city solving random crimes and eventually going to a destination", a shoot-em-up, at least one one-on-one no-weapons fight (more on this in a minute), a car chase, and a finale which usually involves some combination of the above. All five episodes that I have played so far have followed this formula, with very little variation. After the 12th fist-fight it gets kind of old. I promised more about the one-on-one no-weapons fights. This is another area of weakness. At one point, you are in a strip club getting a lap dance when you mention a bank job and the girl turns around, knees you, and then starts a fight. You then have to fight all the strippers. Fine, except they all WAIT IN LINE to fight you! WTF is that? They should all be coming after you at once. Another issue with the fights, as mentioned above, is the horribly repetitive dialogue that Kang spews out. Shoot-em-up missions aren't much better. After you take out, say, three to four criminals who are on-screen, another three to four come in from a side door. You waste them, a chime sounds (like, "OK it's time for more" or something, it's totally bizarre) and more appear from a different side door. Lather, rinse, repeat until the game decides you've killed enough people. Driving missions tend to leave you enough time to just make it to your destination with maybe two to five seconds to spare. If you make one wrong turn, you might as well quit and restart since you can't recover. This also makes the game very frustrating. Overall I was extremely excited about this game, and overall I was very let down by the final product. Activision seems to be dumbing down their games lately - Tony Hawk Underground was released last week and is also extremely easy. These games retail for $50 and should take more than five hours to beat.

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