This game is more orless, like an uncut diamond.
Fast forward to one year later. True Crime: Streets of LA has finally been released on the PC. And was it good? Darn tootin'! NOT! The PC version of True Crime: Streets of LA feels nothing more than the Playstation 2 version of the game directly ported to the PC. The building and character textures are still low-quality garbage, and the bugs. The Bugs. Yes, the bugs haven't been removed despite a year's worth of time to do so but rather, new glitches have been added, the most irritaing ones being the random crashes and freezes that occour after playing the game for a while. The game's draw distance is just plain terrible, with a 2x draw distance rendering available with no options to enhance it. This basically means fences, walls, bulidings, objects, cars and
pedestrians popping right out-of-the-blue especially during a high speed ride, making the game look just ugly. True Crime: Streets of LA has one of the worst collision detection problems in the history of games. Its quite normal for people and objects (Including yourself) to clip through buildings, walls and the list goes on and on. It also makes driving a weird and unnatural experience, with your car just bouncing off the collided object. The car's handling seems to be based on pre-drawn animations rather than proper gravity and physics. The controls are just buggy. This game was basically a direct PS2-to-PC port with a few unlockable player skins of previous Activision game stars like Rikamaru from the Tenchu seires(Yes, there is a Tenchu skin!) and a few of the game's characters thrown in plus a few unlockable weapons that include a baseball bat (Lame), a crossbow (even more lame),and a rocket launcher (Sweet). The controls were basically built for the PS2 and so handles badly on the PC with the controls being irresponsive, espicially the mouse. Putting it on low sensitivity makes the Character turning around a real hassle. So why not use a joystick or gamepad, you say. Well, the cold hard truth is that the game offers no kind of joystick support whatsoever. Come on! This is 2004! People own joysticks, game pads and racing wheels! The good part about the game is that it handles these combinations of fighting, shooting and driving rather well.The game offers 240 square miles of Startlingly realistic GPS accurate Los Angeles to explore that include Venice and Downtown. True Crime also features LA's landmarks like The Staples centre,Los Angeles Convention and The U.S Bank Tower (Although the U.S Bank tower's graphic is rather weird). But just don't try driving up the street from the convention center in search of the Del Taco on Figueroa. It isn't
there. The cars and pedestrians are barley to be seen. The game may have given LA accurate right down to the very gravel, but the traffic and pedestrians are certainly not plentiful! The game's gun fighting system is quite unusual. You start the game with two black Smith&Wesson's Police Cheif's special that contain unlimited ammo (But you still gotta reload). As you go on in the game, you can visit Police shooting ranges where you can can upgrade your weapons with zoom scopes, laser beam targeters, stablizers and so on and so forth or just replace your handguns with new ones altogether. Your gun can also have a presicion aim system, whereby pressing the shhot button for about 3 seconds gives you an almost first person view of you gun. This is particularly useful in neutralizing and head shots (We'll get to that a little ahead). The Protagonist has a two handed fighting system in which he can pickup and fire any two weapons in his hand. This means you can pick up an AK-47 in one hand and a Franchi PA-7 SPAS 12 shotgun in the other and splatter your enemy's guts all around the room. On a negative note, the weapon sounds are just weird and weak, a sloshing noise for shotguns and some handguns and a rubber-band plucking noise for you first hand-gun set.
Now away from the game's technical limitations, True Crime:Streets of LA is the story of a previously suspended "Loose Cannon" cop Nick (Kang) Wilson . The game starts with Kang suspended for not obeying his superiors on a criminal case. The game's voice cast mostly consists of A-List actors like Christopher Walken (Who also serves as the game's narrator) and Russel Wong. True Crime is game that has it's serious moments but is mostly having dark humour. Nick is a guy who trash talks alot. He even calls his new partner his Secretary and asks her to get him some coffee. Despite the rocky begining, Nick and his partner Rosie Velasco soon become good freinds based on mutal respect. But his attitude may still get annoying ,if not funny. The game is unusual for having a branching storyline systems and also allows you to continue despite failing your storyline missions. For example, if you dont beat the timer when rushing to a bulding, the place would go up in flames. YKang can get to his destination on free-roaming missions or solve random crimes that show up on his police scanner. These crimes are rather repititive. You also have a Karma meter which is based on the morality of your actions. For example, killing innocents and giving criminals lethal head-shots with precision aiming will give you bad-cop points which will lead you to the bad ending of the story (This game has 3 different endings). The best part of the game is it's sound track. Music of punk, rap etc. groups belong to the game. They also suit hte mood very well. Like, during high-tension shhot-outs, heavy metal or punk is played. The PC port contains 50 new songs from the original games, making the music even better. Another addition to the PC port is the multiplayer, which is very weak with pings and has rather simple modes like deathmatches and races. If this game had some more work put into it, it would have been very, very popular.
The overall verdict; is True Crime:Streets of LA worth the buy? If you can ignore bugs in the thirst for action, then this is the game for you.