Now, before I get into this, let’s take a look back. I found the game. I’ve previewed it, I’ve seen it at E3, and I’ve tried it out and given impressions on it. Now I’ve beaten it several times and am ready to review it. So help me God, I could get this thing confirmed by the Senate for a Cabinet-level position, I know so much about it, but on with the show.

The story runs like this – you play as tough-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside LAPD detective Nicholas Kang Wilson. Suspended for actions while working Homicide, you have been offered a chance to redeem yourself against the Chinese Triad crime syndicate as a detective again, bearing the shield of the E.O.D, the Elite Operations Division. With jurisdiction over the entire city – and you’ll need it – you proceed to investigate with your new partner Rosie. From then on, it’s your call kid. And the brains at Luxoflux have done a number in providing you with options.

To punch or to kick…that IS the question…

You can choose to play two ways: as a good cop - shooting to disable and taking the time to arrest criminals - or you can play as a bad cop, where not just political power but justice comes from the barrel of a gun, and you know that the sidewalk is really an unrecognized passing lane. You can change your alignment in midst of the story arc, an action that will result in determining which of the three endings you’ll pick up. However, only one of the endings will give you a “Case closed” feeling, so be sure of what you’re doing.

Controls are eccentric, but not terribly so. People have complained about the camera, and the worst I’ve found it to be is during missions that require stealthy moving and attacks from Nick. Then, the camera is virtually out of your control, leaving you at the mercy of the programming. Elsewhere, on the street busting crimes and shooting, I’ve found the programming controlling the camera to be fairly well off, with the only problem being that the C-stick manual control of it is as counterintuitive as it is in Splinter Cell. Another complaint was that in mid-fight, sometimes, attacks would not register. But then, this isn’t Mortal Kombat, it’s True Crime. True Crime. In that you can’t go from a crouching low punch to a jump kick smooth as glass. It’s the little stuff like that that helps with the realism. The commands for picking up weapons gave me a spot of trouble at times, particularly when one is close in to the enemy during hand-to-hand combat, as X does duty both to pick up dropped weapons and grab the opponent for a grapple attack. The only problem I had with driving was breaking the habit of using R for a speed boost, beyond that, there was no problem. Shooting as well is intuitive, with little user control needed beyond pulling the R trigger to fire.


Aw, dammit! A was Accelerate, and R was Massive Traffic Jam! I gotta get those straight…
Missions stem from two modes – pedestrian and driving. The on-foot missions differ in objective, you could have to fight several people hand-to-hand, find yourself in a shootout, or have to sneak into a place through a back entrance. Driving missions also differ as well, from tailing a suspect (which requires precision work), to an all-out race towards a location (which, depending on what you’re driving and where you’re going in the city, can be a true ball-breaker), to the best mission of all – what I’ve dubbed “free time”. You’re given a place to drive to, but no time limit at all. It’s during these missions that you are free to cruise around the city listing to the dispatcher for announcements of various street crimes. It’s busting these everyday people – be they street racers, domestic disturbers, or people that carjack a delivery truck of Activision games (so help me God, that actually happens) – that get you the bulk of the points you need to attend the 24/7 training locations. Shooting ranges, fighting dojos, driving courses, these places are open to you whenever you have one hundred shield points to pay for entrance. But entrance doesn’t guarantee acquisition. You have to pass a test proving your proficiency in the skill in question, be it a new fighting combo, a driving trick, or an accessory for your gun. Once you do that, you can take it out onto the street and use it throughout the rest of the game. And given certain challenges as the game progresses, regardless of what storyline you’re on, you’ll need the upgrades.

Now we come to it at last…the graphics and sound. Texture was the biggest problem in the game, as others have pointed out. Muddied and undefined, they bring back memories of the laments heard when people popped in Eternal Darkness and they found this very same Achilles heel in a similarly fantastic game. In any other judgement, the graphics are fantastic. The characters are nicely detailed and expressive, but not comically so. Luxoflux worked to achieve true expression – the combination of several subtle effects – rather than just jam eye size, eyebrow placement, and jaw level together and call it emotion. The cars were remarkably well done, both for the detail and the number of varieties that can be found in the city limits from street racers to Humvees and Escalades. Granted, these cars never bear such names, but you can tell what you just carjacked…err…”requisitioned” from the poor schlub—dammit---“cooperative citizen” on Wilshire Boulevard.


Well I’ll be…I heard 7,926 different splinters cracking just then. Those guys REALLY did a job!
The sound is a thing of beauty. Quality is just top notch, to the level that I never really found much to complain about between playing it on my set as opposed to Kevin’s surround sound setup. It was just so good that I didn’t find myself in mid-game thinking “Damn, I wish I had Kevin’s rig going right now.” The voice acting was fantastic, with Walken taking the cake every time he came through the speakers with stereotypical so-bad-you-gotta-laugh jokes well-known to the cop drama genre, and the effects were gorgeous, with splintering wood, dented metal, and cracked/shattered glass coming through with stunning realism. In regards to the soundtrack, simply unreal is all I can say. The game lauded hosting a veritable who’s who of the West Coast scene on the soundtrack, which prompted Carl to comment often that he’d rent the game and play it with the TV always on “Mute”. Good news for Carl, the soundtrack features both rock tracks, and is customizable. Meaning what tracks you, the player, may like less than others can be eliminated from the shuffle play. While Kevin was a sucker for Snoop’s new track (“Dance with Me”), I couldn’t lay off upping the odds for “Foe Life” by Mac 10 and Ice Cube to come up more often among the slow-action tracks. (The soundtrack is broken up into three categories – cruising, slow-action [training courses, mostly], and fast-action [shoot-outs, fistfights, etc]).

Overall, I loved this game. Normally, my high hopes are usually considered the juiciest bait to bring Fate around and smash them down – I give you the New York Giants this season – but she seems to have ignored True Crime, and I thank her for it. It gives me something to do on my Sunday afternoons now that there’s nothing worth watching thanks to that vindictive hag. But regardless of my opinions towards philosophical life-affecting concepts, this game is fantastic. Definitely worth a rental, with a purchase immediately pursuant to that unless I miss my guess or you are a bearded co-owner of a GameCube website.