 Review By: Cameron Morris |
Developer: | Luxoflux |
| Publisher: | Activision | |
| Genre: | Action | |
| ESRB: | Mature | |
| # Of Players: | 1 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | N/A | |
| Buy Now: |   |
It's hard to figure what should be expected out of True Crime: New York City. Born as a sort of spiritual successor to a game that was equal parts police drama and circus, street brawler and shoot-em-up, the game has a lot going for it - the only question is whether or not it can live up to its potential.
One of the most notable things about this game, at least at the beginning, is the narrative: you start off with an excellent voice over by the main character's father, explaining the basic premise of the story: you play the part of Marcus Reed, son of one of the most powerful crime lords in New York, and you have just survived a failed assassination attempt on both yourself and your father. The game starts off with you going back to your old hangout to kill everyone who betrayed you. The opening is appropriately dark, over-the-top, dramatic, and engaging. It really sets the tone for a memorable romp through the seedy underbelly of New York.
But that isn't the way things stay. The game's beginning is serious and dramatic enough, with Marcus being forced to turn over a new leaf as an up-and-coming star detective of the NYPD's Organized Crime Division, but soon afterwards the plot and presentation start to slip into "action movie stereotype" territory. I mean don't get me wrong, I like action movies, but when you get into a katana duel with a big scary samurai wannabe, something is amiss. And yes, what they say is true - you can't go to New York without seeing the Italian mob. A lot. The switch in presentation isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if you enjoy genre clichés or making fun of them, but after the dark mood set by the opening the rather silly way the rest of the game plays out can be disorienting, or even disappointing.
The game plays quite a bit like the venerable Grand Theft Auto series: you have a set of Case missions that advance the plot directly, usually with someone for you to interrogate at the end so you will have information for your next mission. These missions are notable if only because they're where most of the game's story comes out and most of the characters are introduced (and usually die in colorful ways), and if you're the type who plays a game just to see the ending then of course this is where you'll be spending most of your time. These missions aren't "bad" in the traditional sense of the word, but they can't be called good because they're rarely very exciting and never original or unique. All of them save for one eventually amount to getting into a massive shootout with every two-bit hood that a particular faction of organized crime can throw at you.
The second kind of mission is obtained from the game's Informants, people you can go to and do work for in exchange for information. These missions are noteworthy if only because they allow you to interact with some of the best characters in the game, Isaiah Reed in particular, but they suffer from a problem similar to the main missions in that they're all cut and paste copies of each other with different trimmings to make them seem unique. Typically you'll have to tail some guy who's giving your informant some trouble and then catch him doing something illegal before beating the tar out of him, or protect a specific car from people following it, or breaking some guy's legs. That's pretty much it. The explanations that your informants give for these missions are really their best aspect, and in that respect they're going to be entertaining, but they all start to bleed together pretty quickly.
The Department assigns the third type of mission to you, and these consist of either going into an illegal fight club and beating up everyone inside or getting into a drag race and winning there. These of course are all pretty much the same thing except with increasing difficulty, but they affect gameplay directly by pretty heftily lowering the crime rate of whatever district you happen to be busting crime in.
Crime rate directly affects the last kind of mission, which is a problematic breed. Like most sandbox games, you have free-roaming missions you can do, which pop up almost at random and are reported through your radio. These missions are fairly varied and occur more often depending on where you are in the city - the only thing is that they're very distracting, especially if you're the obsessive-compulsive type who absolutely has to do everything that's said over the radio, and they pop up a lot. And I mean a lot.
The random missions popping up so much wouldn't be a problem, of course, if it weren't for the fact that most of your primary missions are huge distances apart. And that of course leads me to one inescapable fact: Manhattan is utterly gigantic. It can literally take upwards of five or ten minutes to get from one end of the island to the other, depending on what you're driving and which direction you're going and how often some new crime pops up, and sometimes it's really easy just to be awed by the sheer scope of the game's environment. Less impressive is the amount of variety in the surroundings, which is somewhat understandable if the game really is true to the architecture of its locale, but it still manages to make navigation even harder than it would have been anyway. If it weren't for the fact that you can take a taxi to any part of the city almost instantly, this game would have driven me insane.
The graphics for the game are pretty standard fare: character models are fairly nice for the main characters, while enemy models all look like clones of each other. The city itself is gritty and drab, for the most part, and frame rates of course tend to suffer when you're barreling down one of the main avenues, blazing past other cars and wayward pedestrians. Not really a lot to say here - detail isn't great, and as an example, what might have been meant as serious gore in places comes across as humorous, with hit detection that often doesn't make a lot of sense.
The sound in the game is really a bit of a mixed bag - sound effects in general are pretty wimpy, never having any really impressive moments that comes to mind, while the voices acting in general is pretty excellent, with Christopher Walken and Laurence Fishburne in particular being pleasures to listen to. The soundtrack is really hit-or-miss depending on your tastes; I have no problems with rap or hip hop so it was really a rather nice experience for me, and there's some Blue Oyster Cult in there somewhere, but if you don't like this kind of music then it's really going to grind on you. I know that one track in particular was so abrasive that I literally could not stay in the store where it was playing and had to leave, so this wasn't a uniformly pleasant experience.
Did I mention that people swear in this game? Oh do they ever. This is one game you don't play in your living room if only because your parents will disown you. I didn't make a tally or anything, but if I had to make a guess at how many times I heard the F word said in my time playing, I would number it at roughly eighty billion. This'll make parents explode and will amuse younger kids to no end, but for most of us it just loses its edge and gets tiresome about halfway through the story.
The play mechanics under which all of this operates are pretty simple, but not to the point of feeling like they were just slapped on there. The third-person shooter bits feel adequate, though one can't always aim as quickly as one needs to and precision aiming is really hard unless you go into the game's version of bullet time, which takes all of the challenge out of a lot of gunfights while not helping at all in others. The melee combat is pretty basic and never complicated, but manages to be satisfying and come across as brutal from time to time. If you're looking for depth you're out of luck, but at least it's functional.
Might as well go back and mention one of the game's key features: the ability to play good cop or bad cop. You get "good cop points" for performing actions like a good cop ought to - shooting to disarm rather than to kill, arresting a suspect, refusing bribes, and so on. "Bad cop points", by contrast, are earned by shooting first and asking questions later, planting evidence on innocent people, and killing people who don't need killing. It can be argued that bad cop points are actually easier to get, especially since you get a huge amount for wasting innocent bystanders, but the benefits of getting good cop points are so huge that there's really no point to even trying to be bad. Being a good cop advances your rank faster, giving you access to more special features, vehicles, weapons, and money, and lowers the crime rate in the city so you're closer to completely finishing the game every time you perform a good cop action. Bad cop points just reward you with a raised crime rate and a little extra cash, which you would have gotten anyway if you were a good cop. Add this to the fact that neither really affects the story in any meaningful way and the only reason to perform bad cop actions over good is out of mean spirit - and believe me, I tried for a long time to find some way to make it work to my advantage without a lot of extra effort.
This is really something I didn't want to bring up at any point in the review, but it keeps scratching at the back of my head and I feel like it's my job to either warn you or entice you, depending on how this information comes across: True Crime: New York City plays and feels like a clone of the Grand Theft Auto series. I know that can almost go without saying, but I was expecting something a lot different given the game's opening and the apparently grittier and less stylized setting of an actual American city. Despite all the effort that went into making the game's environments authentic, the often humorous missions really drive home the point that this does play like GTA with a badge, and the game doesn't do enough differently to really make itself into a unique experience.
Bottom Line:
I wanted to like True Crime: New York City a lot more than I ended up liking it, but in truth I pretty much got what I expected. It's an experience that we've had before in one form or another, and it doesn't do anything new or break any new ground. The city's too big to be functional (though I applaud Luxoflux for the effort that must have gone into it), all the missions start to feel identical about halfway through the game, and the story takes a hard left turn from serious drama into comedic fluff. The play mechanics are functional but dated, and the same can be said for most of the graphics. The only part of the game that really stands out is the voice acting - I just can't get over how cool Laurence Fishburne makes Isaiah Reed sound. Everything else about it is simply old hat. And yes, people, I know it's hard to believe, but after you hear it too many times, even the novelty of the dreaded F word in a videogame wears off after a while.
The game will of course appeal to you if you just can't get enough of this kind of game: if you're so big a fan of sandbox-type games that you will jump on anything even remotely like one, then by all means grab this because it's for you. But if you want something fresh, something consistent or something that shows what life is really like in New York City, you should probably keep walking.
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6.5 |
Posted: 2006-01-21 08:47:34PST