Product Description

In True Crime: Streets of L.A., players assume the role of rogue Elite Operations Division (EOD) operative Nick Kang, a no-holds-barred badass, whose brutal reputation and lethal skills have landed him the nasty task of taking down the Chinese Triad and Russian Mafia cartel that has turned the City of Angels into a war zone. Take part in explosive gun battles with double-fisted firepower, devastating martial-arts brawls and high-speed shoot-outs across 250 square miles of accurately recreated LA. In car or on-foot, the unique branching missions include locating hostile witnesses, searching for case-cracking clues, taking out evasive informants and busting the heavily armed and deadly bad guys.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9136 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: ACTIVISION
• Released on: 2003-11-07
• Rating: To Be Announced
• Platform: Xbox

Customer Reviews

5 Stars based on price of under £10. Great game anyway.
I have given the game five stars based on the fact that it costs less than a tenner and is a great game.

However regardless of price it is still a great game in its own right. It would be an exaggeration to say its better than GTAIII or even as good as GTAIII, but that's not to knock the game, as few games are as good as GTA or Vice City.
The game is played from a different perspective that GTA. In this game you are the good guy, the cop. You solve crimes instead of creating them. That certainly doesn't mean it is boring. Far from it. It is addictive and as it isn't quite as open a game as GTA you are propelled forward by the set story line. You can go off and 'play around' doing things but eventually you will reach the end of each level. In that way it's more of a traditional game than GTA.

Graphically the game is very good, as are the sounds and the dialogue is very good, especially the comments from the lead character. The music is very gangster rap, but it's not too off-putting.

If you have been playing GTA you will find the controls different, but it doesn't take long to get used to and it's definitely worth 15 minutes of perseverance.

If you have never played GTA you will be amazed at how good this game is. If you have played GTA you will still enjoy it.

Over all if you were at all considering this game I would say go for it. At less than £10 it's really impossible to be disappointed.

You Have the Right to Longevity... Don't You?
Although True Crime is an exciting proposal from the outset, the ability to drive, fight, use stealth and shoot as the whim takes you in the game is not quite as seamless as the developers would have you to believe. Instead you are ushered into the different ‘modes’ as you enter different areas of the story line. There are beat ‘em up style bits which have a sort of Streets of Rage feel, driving bits which feel like what the Getaway was probably supposed to feel like had it not been so flawed and boring and fighting bits which feel a bit like Max Payne with targeting. Each one of these modes feels great, yet at no time do you feel that you are completely free to do whatever you like. I suppose freedom is not the be all and end all and wherever there is any type of narrative in a game it is unavoidable that you will have to be directed to objectives to some degree.

The branching story too isn’t quite as branching as it appears. There were times right from the outset when I blasted some perp right into the middle of next week, but yet in the following cut scene I was informed that he was down at the station ‘helping the police with their enquiries’… or something like that. Still alive anyway, which he wouldn’t be with half a hundredweight of lead in him.

Fighting, although the best so far for a trans-genre game like this and certainly much better than the GTA franchise still descends into random button bashing as singling out an opponent in a group accurately can often be a little hit and miss. The rotation of the camera too, often hinders precision tasks.

The game engine and physics while driving are commendable. Better than the Getaway but not as good as Vice City to be frank. For me it feels that while cornering feels slick and responsive, braking, skidding and performing aggressive driving moves leaves you feeling a little disconnected from the action. Lack of dramatic car damage and the ability to flip your vehicle don’t help matters either. You don’t really feel the tires melting onto the tarmac the way you do in Vice City.

As usual I seem to be mentioning a lot of negative things and haven’t yet said that True Crime is immediately gratifying and has a hell of a lot of good stuff going for it. For those of you who don’t already know you play Nick Kang, rent-a-maverick badass type who thankfully, the developers have not drawn in too serious a light. Yes, Nick is a man on a mission but that doesn’t stop him from quipping, kicking and basically jaunting his way through the game in rather a likeable fashion.

Woven into the free roaming segways of the game Nick has the opportunity to increase his abilities at various locations around time is a sort of RPGish fashion, learning additional fighting moves and enhanced weaponary abilities as the game progresses. This allows more depth and development to Nick’s character, all in all fleshing him out more as an individual and not to mention marking a welcome departure from rival titles in the genre. The cut scenes too are frankly fabulous with very realistic looking facial expressions and the kind of dialogue which you might expect from a cast punctuated by A list actors and actresses.

However it was while I was playing the game, enjoying the magnificently constructed cut-scenes that it suddenly and abruptly ended. One minute I was chasing Gary Oldman down a runway in his private plane and the next minute the main story of the game was over, giving me only some half hearted footnote that it was all North Korea’s fault. Sadly going back to the randomly generated street crimes after the high octane thrills and spills of the games main story didn’t quite cut it. So there you have it. All completed in one long weekend and no amount of gloss and high production values can make up for the fact that that isn’t very good value for money.

To conclude the game is technically flawed, but solid and great fun. Sadly there just isn’t enough of it to challenge experienced gamers for very long. I wanted more. A lot more.

A game to be played!!
True Crime was supposed to be better than GTA Vice City or at least have its similarities. But unfortunately the only thing the same is the brilliant music that accompanies the game at ecery minute.
Anyway the game is quite good. Its storyline is set on the the character Nick Kang , a disturbed cop that goes back to work but ends up trying to find out the truth of what happened to his father.
The way the game moves along is very good as because if you fail a mission then you can go onto an alternative mission, which is totally different in the area of gaming, is one of its highlights.
The graphics are reasonable compared to GTA Vice City but nothing spectacular again compared to the hype surrounding the game prior to its release.
Disappointingly, background charcters seem to pop up again and again in the missions whisch spoils it.
Overall the game is good but becomes extremely repitive. Tryable but ,maybe not buyable.