For a GTA knockoff, True Crime isn't that bad of a game.
The plotline of True Crime is like this: You play as Nick Kang, a loose-cannon cop who doesn't play by the rules. After the disappearance of his father and disobeying the law frequently, he is transferred to the Elite Operations Division and must solve a series of crimes from triads around the boroughs of Los Angeles, California. Kang must solve these crimes while trying to find the answer to his father's disappearance.
True Crime is like Grand Theft Auto in many ways: You can steal cars, drive around the city, and cause mayhem. But unlike GTA, which takes place in a fictitious city, True Crime uses the actual city of Los Angeles, CA (around 240 square miles of it) as its backdrop. It's relatively accurate to most areas, except some famous locations are missing. Such as that big television studio down by Fairfax Blvd. and Beverly Blvd that some big television game show tapes at. Yeah, Luxoflux left out The Bob Barker Studio, where The Price is Right tapes, among other television studios and buildings around similar regions in the city. I can understand this reasoning (to avoid licensing fees and whatnot), but put something fictitious there or something! Seeing a large building like a Supermarket take its place is disappointing.
There is one thing that GTA always had an advantage with, and that was having many side missions to do during the main storyline, such as playing a taxi driver, or doing motocross races. But True Crime does not have any of those types of side missions for the player to do. However, to make the game somewhat less dull, while you're out on the streets of LA, random crimes will occur that you can solve. Some involve street fights and muggers, but if you're in a car, chances are you'll need to chase after car thieves with crazed intentions (such as a guy, who thinks he's a vampire, hijacking an ambulance full of blood samples) or stop a street race. There are other missions while you're driving around in LA, such as evading enemies in a car, tailing a car, and racing to a destination within a time limit. But to say that the crimes are the only side mission in this game is partially incorrect. Strewn around the city are 30 Dogg Bones. If you find them all and save at any time during the course of the game, you unlock the Dogg Patrol, where you solve crimes as rapper Snoop Dogg. It's an interesting bonus, but it does not replace the many side missions GTA had.
Besides driving around in a city, True Crime has three other gameplay types: Shooting, Fighting, and Sneaking. In shooting missions, it plays like a third person shooter in the vein of Max Payne or Dead to Rights. Shooting missions usually require you to get to the other side while killing everything in your path without dying. However, True Crime's targeting system takes the term "auto-targeting" a little too literally: Most of the time you can just hammer the fire button without even attempting to aim, kill the enemies, and just keep moving, with an occasional dive to make it more interesting. You can also hold the fire button to slow time down and give more precision shots, but this only comes useful when solving crimes. You also can pick up guns that enemies drop, and hold two different guns at the same time, even assault rifles and shotguns. Nothing is sillier than seeing Nick Kang hold an AK-47 in one hand and a SPAS-12 shotgun in the other.
In Fighting missions, you have three attack buttons (punch, low kick, high kick), a block button, and a button used to grapple someone. When fighting, enemies will have exclamation marks near their health bar. When you've made enough hits, you can hit the three attack buttons in a certain combination to do a finishing move. While it has a little bit of depth, most enemies will either get you in a grapple repeatedly, or just hammer attacks on you frequently. You can basically mash buttons and block at the right times, and most of the time that works. Like in the shooting levels, there are items that you can pick up and attack/throw at your enemy.
Stealth is the worst of the three. You have to sneak around without being noticed. You can knock enemies out with a tranquilizer gun, but unlike the Shooting levels, it does not automatically target enemies, plus it only has three shots, of which you cannot get extra ammo for. You can also knock enemies unconscious or outright kill them. These missions are the most annoying because they require tons of patience and practice, and half the time you need to sneak around people because knocking enemies out frequently may have another guard on his patrol notice you, failing the mission.
When you solve crimes, complete missions among other things, you receive reward points. 100 reward points awards you a badge. These badges are used to upgrade your guns, your fighting's finishing moves, and stunts you can do in cars. However, you lose reward points upon failing missions, dying, getting vehicles repaired and regaining health, so you have to be relatively conservative at times if you wish to have a large amount of badges to use for upgrades.
In addition, every action you do in the game adds to a meter that refers you as either a good cop or a bad cop. Doing good cop deeds mean you must incapacitate an enemy after a fight, arresting perpetrators and not killing innocents. Bad cop deeds are the opposite, basically killing everyone you see. However, attempting to go on a rampage isn't anything like GTA, and it's not as fun. There's a middle meter in-between your reward points and good cop/bad cop status, and once it fills up after causing mayhem, you'll have swarms of criminals be after you. It's not as fun as GTA because in that game, you'd be chasing against higher levels of authority. This is not the case in True Crime, and it's disappointing.
Since this game has relatively interesting but underdeveloped dynamics, True Crime does use a stronger dynamic when doing missions. If you succeed, you go to the next mission, naturally. However, if you fail, you can attempt the mission again or simply continue the storyline as if you actually failed it. Selecting missions works differently from GTA: rather than simply drive around to a marker in the city, you just select your mission from a menu. While this is convenient, Luxoflux lost out on a big opportunity to have some sort of free-roaming option. This, and adding side missions, would've prolonged the replay value. Once you complete an episode, your progress is tallied. If you succeeded in every story mission, you get to go Bonus Crusin' for a chance to get better guns, grapple moves or a new car. However, fail any mission and you have to go on Crime Patrol and solve a number of crimes adjacent to the number of missions you failed, to continue the storyline. It's a nice dynamic, and it's better than the "Fail and keep retrying the mission ad infinitum" problem that GTA suffers from.
Graphically this game looked pretty stunning in 2003. Since this is the Xbox version, the game runs at a relatively smooth framerate, but it also has a share of bugs and glitches. Bugs such as enemies get stuck on/into cars, cars acting weirdly, the game freezing, even times where it wouldn't even load the game and gave me an error saying that this disc may be "dirty or damaged". The last two could be faults of my Xbox and not of the game itself as these occurences were very rare, but to see glitches like these in this game is no excuse.
Do you like rap or hip-hop? Then True Crime is the game for you. It has a myriad of hip-hop, rap and rock music that's separated into three groups: "Crusin" (Hip-hop), "Fast Action" (Rock) and "Slow Action" (Rap), and most of it fits well. And something tells me that some of the songs were part of some special promotional for the game, as a couple of the songs reference the game itself (either by the title or by its gameplay) in some meta aspect that's kind of weird. Since this is the Xbox version, you can use your custom soundtracks in the game. Nothing is more amusing than hearing A-ha's The Living Daylights while trying to upgrade your guns, or to hear music by Rob Dougan while driving. However, GTA did the music by radio stations, True Crime plays it more like a CD player or MP3 player: You hear a track start when you enter a car, and it stops once you leave the car. When you get in a car again, a new track starts. The problem is that with so much music in the game, hearing your custom soundtracks, let alone any unique songs, might be a bit rare. Thankfully, you can set which tracks you wish to listen to in the game's options, and this is where you have to enable your custom soundtrack.
True Crime features an interesting ensemble of actors to voice the characters in this game. From Michelle Rodriguez, to Gary Oldman, to CCH Pounder, to the man himself, Christopher Walken. Russell Wong voices the main character, Nick Kang, and Luxoflux decided to make Kang somewhat of a repartee character in the veins of Duke Nukem or Ash Williams. While some of the lines are amusing ("Heeeeeeere comes a lead enema!"), others are not ("Maybe you guys just need a BIG HUG!"). Although, Wong does get extra brownie points for making fun of Keanu Reeves in Point Break with a line from a movie parodied when Kang steals cars ("I am an E-O-D agent!"). Every actor gives a good performance, and hey, you can't go wrong with Christopher Walken in your video game.
The game branches into 3 different endings, and depending on how you do, you will end up with a different approach to each. When you get to certain parts of the game, it gets borderline bizarre and disturbing. Such as two missions inside a fetish bar, and a few missions underground that have so much crazy imagery in it (such as shooting flaming demon skulls) that it makes you wonder what the developers were smoking. But once you beat the game, there's no incentive to go back to it unless you want to get all the upgrades and unlockables.
I know I made a lot of comparisons to Grand Theft Auto, but when there's a game that's similar to it in many aspects, comparisons just can't be avoided. Luxoflux lost out on a great opportunity to match, let alone surpass GTA. But they forgot a few things that made GTA interesting, and instead of a great game that beats it, you have an okay game that doesn't do anything special. It won't beat GTA, but if you want to see a different take on the free-roaming city genre, True Crime: Streets of LA is not a bad choice.
Pros: (Almost) accurate representation of a city, good graphics (for the time), decent voice acting, a nice blend of game elements.
Cons: Bugs, frequent bouts of repetition, not enough bonuses to keep the user playing.