In True Crime you take on the role of a young and brash Asian cop by the name of Nick Kang who’s been kicked off the force for breaking the rules one too many times. In the opening moments of the game you’re asked to join up with a new division of the L.A. Police known as the E.O.D.—I don’t recall what it stands for and, honestly, it doesn’t matter—precisely for the qualities that got him suspended in the first place and turned loose on an unsuspecting populace. We’re told that Nick’s father was also a cop and disappeared some years earlier and given the hint that we may discover his fate during the course of the story as Nick takes on warring Chinese and Russian gangs and attempts to make the streets safe once again.

It doesn’t take more than a casual glance to realize that True Crime looks and plays a lot like the massively popular Grand Theft Auto series. There’s a huge city to explore (based on real-world L.A.), you can take cars from random citizens at will, there’s plenty of shooting with various firearms, and you can get out on foot to put the beat-down on folks if you should feel the need. The folks at Luxoflux didn’t want to just put out a “me too” imitation of GTA in hopes of cashing in on the concept while it was still popular, though, so they put a good effort into trying to improve upon the ideas that made GTA so popular. Were they successful? Well, yes and no.

First up they addressed one of the big criticisms leveled at GTA by various groups who get up in arms about such things by making the main character into a cop. Granted he’s a loose-cannon, do-it-my-way-or-the-highway, immune-to-all-the-rules, action-hero cop, but that’s still better in some peoples’ mind than the drug trafficking, prostitute using, random murdering, criminal characters in the GTA series. Which isn’t to say you can’t open fire on innocent bystanders or drive down the sidewalks decorating your bumper with various pedestrians for no apparent reason if you really, really want to, but it will affect your good cop/bad cop rating which is one of the new things in True Crime. Solving crimes and arresting criminals will result in your cop rating increasing by one point whereas killing innocents or non-life threatening offenders will decrease your cop rating by one point. As long as your rating is 0 or higher you’re considered a “good cop” and once you get into negative numbers you’re a “bad cop.“ This supposedly has an impact on how the good citizens of L.A. respond to you, but the only real effect I’ve seen is that it makes potential perps more likely to shoot back when you confront them. There is also a meter that shows the level of unrest among the citizens and the more mayhem you commit in a short period of time the more it increases until roving bands of vigilantes start hunting you down ultimately culminating in your own fellow police officers being ordered to bring you in. Surprisingly you can get away with a lot of random violence before the good folks of L.A. get really fed up with you. Lastly you also earn “shield points” for doing good things like arresting bad guys and for every 100 shield points earned you collect a “badge” that allows admittance to various training centers around the city that will grant you new weapons and abilities. Doing bad things, like killing without good cause or dieing, will result in a subtraction from your shield points and the loss of a badge if your shield points drop below the minimum needed for a badge, though once you get to 0 points you can’t lose any more even if you die so the only real drawback is you can’t get into the training centers. So there’s an attempt to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior in True Crime and that should keep the parent groups happy.

True Crime tries to set itself apart by beefing up three big aspects of the game—fighting, shooting, and driving—with unlockable goodies via the aforementioned training centers. Successfully completing the challenges at each will unlock a new ability or upgrade related to the training. For example, one of the first shooting upgrades you can earn is the ability to shoot at two targets at once. Then you can earn the ability to do precision shots which puts you in a slow-mo semi-first person shooter view so you can aim at specific areas of a target such as an arm or leg (for neutralizing shots +1 good cop) or the head (for head shots, natch, -1 good cop) and in the case of vehicles the tires (to slow or disable) or the gas tank (for the pure malicious fun of it). Driving upgrades include things like the ability to do high speed braking turns or nudging a vehicle to force a spin out and fighting upgrades allow for various combos you can use once you’ve stunned an opponent via standard fisticuffs. At the end of each chapter there is a bonus mission that allows you to pick one of these three activities in order to unlock a bigger bonus such as up to three additional cars which Nick can own or special martial arts throws or more powerful default guns.

This is all pretty cool except that none of it adds as much to the game play as you would think it should. A couple of the gun upgrades are truly useful such as the faster auto-aiming and the laser-sight for the precision mode and the unlockable cars are neat, but hand-to-hand combat more often than not ends up being a button mashing affair with anything aside from the simplest combos almost impossible to pull off intentionally and the extra driving skills have yet to prove practical in standard game play. Trying to aim in the precision shot mode is a lesson in frustration if the target is moving as the analog sticks are very touchy. More than once I’ve killed a suspect I was trying to neutralize because by the time I got the shot lined up and off they moved enough to turn it into a normal hit and the guns later in the game are strong enough to kill in one hit. This means that after awhile you don’t really give a shit about visiting the training centers for anything outside of possibly the next gun upgrade. Which is a shame cause it’s not a bad idea and it does expand upon the rather simple shooting and hand-to-hand combat of GTA.

The other problem with the game is that there isn’t a whole lot to do if you’re not doing one of the missions that moves the story forward. As you walk or drive around the city you’ll get calls about various crimes in progress over the police radio which you can pursue or ignore as you wish. The different crimes are varied and will involve muggings, car jackings, pursuing kidnappers, dealing with crazed celebrities, etc. but they all basically involve tracking down the criminal and either scaring, beating, or shooting them into submission. Beyond that the only other thing to do is to harass the passersby with random searches that would make John Ashcroft swell with pride in the hopes of finding someone carrying illegal drugs or weapons. As it turns out harassing the populace is the best and easiest way to build up a positive Good Cop score which you’ll probably have to do from time to time after accidentally harming too many innocents. Every bust gives a +1 and there’s no negative consequences to a failed search so to hell with privacy concerns, frisk away! There is also apparently some sort of rating system in place for launching your vehicle into the air in some spectacular manner, but finding a way to do this is way too difficult to bother. Unlike the GTA games, True Crime doesn’t have any fixed jumps scattered around the map for you to search out. Instead ramps and jumps in TC show up randomly on the streets in the form of various obstacles such as a mound of dirt from a street repair underway and by the time you realize what it is you’ve probably already passed it. Turning around to go back and hit the jump results in its sudden and miraculous disappearance. That’s about it for things to do when not pursuing the story missions. Sure you can go back to any of the training centers you’ve already completed and play them over and over again if you want, but they’re not that much fun the first time around.

The story missions themselves tend to fall into well-defined categories as well and are usually proceeded and followed by cut scenes. Driving sequences can involve racing against the clock to get someplace or successfully tailing another vehicle, but usually don’t have any limits placed on them otherwise and that’s when you can waste time solving the random crimes or just running around causing trouble. At one point I was supposed to head straight over to a cafe to meet my new partner, but by the time I got done chasing every random crime that popped up on my way to the cafe a good couple of hours of real-time had passed and yet the cut scene that followed made no mention of my tardiness and acted as though only minutes had passed. Another story mission will involve beating the crap out of someone in a closed environment with lots of destructible objects scattered around such as the cafe I just mentioned. This can be a lot of fun as you kick people and send them flying through tables and chairs which smash apart in a most satisfying manner or body slam them into an oil drum filled with (apparently) nitroglycerin which explodes and sets your opponent on fire for a short while. Sometimes you’ll have to engage in a stealth mission and sneak your way into a building which is usually followed by a shooting mode where you make your way further by shooting everything that moves. Eventually you get to a boss fight of some sort which can be trying to take out a sniper before he takes you out or, in a nod to Big Trouble In Little China, blasting the bejezus out of a Chinese dragon. Most of these are entertaining enough the first few times you do them, though the stealth missions just plan old suck as far as I’m concerned as the events in them unfold the same way every time. That said,

get old around about the twentieth time you do them and you find yourself forgoing the story missions altogether for the simple joy of driving around shooting the gas tanks of random cars just to watch the cars explode.

In terms of graphics the game is very impressive and looks better than either of the two GTA titles released for the PS2 so far. Explosions look cool as do the cars themselves and character models are well rendered even though there’s only a handful of variations so the populace looks like it’s made up of the clones of half a dozen people who all wear exactly the same clothing as their siblings varying only in color choices. I have no idea how accurate the model of L.A. is having only been there once in my life and not having driven at all while I was there, but it’s believable enough. The audio is also excellent with some big name voice actors for the main characters including a hilarious turn by Christopher Walken as the grizzled old Sargent who knew Nick’s father and helps narrate the story. Again, though, the general populace seems to have at most maybe a dozen different lines of dialog that they repeat endlessly whenever you harass them with searches. Hearing someone complain “Aw man! Did anyone get this on video?!?“ for the four-thousandth time in a row after failing to find contraband on someone you searched is only slightly less grating than hearing “Man! Get offa my balls!“ for the four-thousandth and one time. Though I will confess that I never grow tired of whoever the hell starts yelling “Awwwww diggity! Ohhhhhh diggity damn! I gotta go!“ when I start letting the lead fly in the streets. It makes me laugh every damned time. Finally, the story itself is interesting and the game sports multiple endings depending on your rating when you finish or which branches you take. Plus you can unlock “Snoop Dogg” and then play the game again with him as the main character, complete with authentic Snoop Doggisms recorded by the man himself.

If there had never been a Grand Theft Auto III or a GTA: Vice City then this would have been an excellent title despite its flaws simply because it would be the first of its kind. As it stands, however, True Crime is an ambitious title that falls short for trying too hard. The thing about the GTA games that keeps you coming back is that there’s just

in the game, most of which will result in some unlockable feature if you do it long enough. You can spend an entire session of playing Vice City doing nothing but putting out fires in a firetruck or ferrying passengers around in a taxi if you want to. Anytime you get bored with the story missions there are at least a dozen other things you can do for awhile instead of pursue a life of crime. In TC you can solve a handful of repeating random crimes, harass innocent passersby or engage in the futility of trying to find jumps to launch your car off of. Even engaging in random chaos is just more fun in GTA than TC. Shoot a car in TC and it either continues along as though nothing happened or it’ll stop. Shoot a car in GTA and it may try to speed off and cause a hilarious pileup in the process. There’s also no small amount of dark humor when a carjacking in Vice City sometimes leaves you with a passenger who will scream bloody murder as you tear across the landscape until the vehicle slows enough for them to try and jump out.

OK, so I’ve chewed up a lot of space so far and made it sound like I didn’t like True Crime: Streets of L.A., but the truth is I do like it and I can appreciate what the developers were trying to accomplish. It’s not a bad game on its own merits and it does toss some new ideas into the mix which could end up being really cool if tweaked a bit in a sequel should they make one. If they can manage to give you more stuff to do when not pursuing the storyline missions that would also help. Though if they really want to do something different they should find a way to take the game online while keeping the free form game play intact. Anyway, if you go into it expecting a GTA killer then you’re going to be disappointed, but if you look at it as something to tide you over till GTA: San Andreas comes along then you’ll probably enjoy it.

Update: Looks like there is indeed a True Crime 2 in the works.