In the interest of full disclosure, this review is written without having finished the game. I picked the game up on a 7 day rental and after literally forcing myself to play it for a 3rd evening returned it. Aside from some very nice graphics, this game falls hideously short of its obvious inspiration: Grand Theft Auto. Hopefully, the folks at Rockstar will get the GTA series moved in this direction graphically, but beyond that, they need pay zero attention to True Crime as a competitor. Let's start with the driving element. I mean, that's what this game is about, no? Recreating LA's streets to such a degree must have been a tremendous undertaking and for what? Do I as a player feel encouraged to drive around and experience it? NO! The feel of the cars from both a handling and speed perspective was a huge disappointment. Combined with the fact that the camer is fixed on the car so that every bump in the road causes the entire panorama of the background to jiggle was enough to give me a near-epileptic fit and a migraine for certain. I play a ton of games and this is the first time on a PC or console that screen jitter/sway gave me problems. Again, this actually downgraded the beautiful graphics because they were constantly bobbing erratically as my car bounced down the road. Whoever decided to lock the camera relative to the car should be taken out and maimed as death would be too kind. Now for the sound. I'm going to leave out the hideous crap that passes for music in this game as I was able to use my own soundtrack on my Xbox. I went with the default music for the first night (say 5 hours) before I had to change it because I wanted to do one of two things 1) vomit or 2) throw anything around. No wonder urban and gang violence is so hi if this is what is being listened too. I wanted to kill someone after 3 hours of this junk. Also, even though I was able to substitute my soundtrack, during fighting sequences, I was still subjected to c-rap/hippity-hoppity noise... aaaaghhhhh! The controls in gunfighting were actually an improvement over GTA whose gunplay mechanics are quite weak. Fighting was a mixed bag and I chalk up some of my frustration with the fighing mechanics to my general "ho-hum" attitude toward fighting games/mechanics in general. However, one thing was particularly frustrating when attempting to train in attacking opponents behind me. Unless the target dropped down directly behind me such that I didn't have to do any turning, I was fine and I attacked with the various attacks. However, if I had to turn at all, the character automatically turned and faced the target and I could not turn away without running away which moved me out of attack range. The auto-face-the-opponent feature when there are moves built around NOT facing the opponent became a huge frustration and one of the key reasons I returned the game. Oh yeah, one last gameplay mechanic that had me ready to fling the disc into the woods behind my house was the inability to change the horizontal camera handling. They did provide for the ability to reverse the up/down (vertical) control, but didn't for the left/right (horizontal) control. This is a MUST-HAVE feature as we all have particular games we play a lot of that have us trained to think of "push-left" as rotate left or vice-versa. In 2004 it is unforgivable to force me to learn the choice the development team prefers! Now for the story... might have been good if I'd finished it. I actually was a bit sorry I couldn't deal with any more of the game to get more info on the story, so that tells me it wasn't as awful as some other reviews portrayed it. However, the "driving around town" missions were extremely repetitive and unimaginative. Let's see there was "stolen script, please retrieve", "pissed off actress", "dude with syringe"/"dude with scissors", "teens street-racing", "pimp beating girls", "hostage taker", "gunfight" and maybe a couple more, but after 2 hours of the game, I'd heard these same crimes multiple times and couldn't bring myself to chase them down again knowing that an epileptic event was just over the next curb. Anyway, guess you can tell I didn't like this game and am extremely disappointed the engine appears to have a lot of potential, but needed some last few mods to make it truly cool and fun if not great.
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