True Crime: New York City Review
December 28, 2005 by Ron Williamson
by Ron Williamson - December 28, 2005
Back on the streets with a badge and a thirst for revenge you play as Marcus Reed, a former criminal turned cop. After your mentor is murdered you make it your job to find those responsible using any means necessary. As you track down some of the biggest crime rings in New York City you must also stop any other petty crimes you might encounter on the way, throwing yourself constantly into gun fight after gun fight all for the sake of justice. In True Crime: New York City you make the laws and you make the arrests.
Who Knew Being a Cop Could be so Fun?
With the success of the Grand Theft Auto series more and more games are having open-ended missions with entire cities you can explore or destroy. In order to set your self apart from the rest of the games developers are going to have to think of new and innovative elements to add to the games. True Crime: New York City has several such elements. You know how in Grand Theft Auto you have to wait for a car to stop before you can get into it, well you don�t have that incontinence anymore. Now with a simple flash of the badge or warning shot in the air you can make citizens or even other police offers stop their cars and surrender them to you. They have also added motorcycles, which happen to be the fastest and most fun vehicles in game.
So once you�ve commandeered a vehicle and you start running down those criminals you�re going to have to defend yourself. This is one area where True Crime: New York City shines the most. Like a lot of other third-person games they have an auto lock on feature that utilizes the left trigger. With this feature you can simply lock onto an offender and shoot away. Once they are dead simply press it again to target the next crook. This works well in most cases, but what about when there are civilians around or when someone has taken a hostage. Simply blasting everything will earn you a considerable amount of �bad cop� points. In cases such as this you can click the right thumb stick and enter into a Resident Evil 4 perspective with a reticule, and you are in bullet-time. To slow time down just a little more so you can line up that perfect headshot hold down the left trigger. Since you are a cop and not a criminal you do have to abide by some rules.
Just killing everyone won�t get you anywhere in this game. A colored bar appears above each criminals head indicating how dangerous they are. Unless they are armed you aren�t allowed to kill them. Of course you can, but it makes it harder for you to move up in the department. To deal with these kinds of people you have to engage in armed or hand-to-hand combat. You can arm yourself with any number of items. You have your trusty nightstick, but if customers in a restaurant start fighting and they break a chair there is nothing stopping you, or them, from picking up the pieces and doing some more damage. You actually have some moves you can do to suppress an attacker. With different button combinations you can deal different amounts of damage and different attacks. This helps to make busting people a little less monotonous and little more enjoyable. If you see anyone on the street that might look suspicious you have the right to frisk them at anytime. If you thought they might be carrying something, and they weren�t, you can always just plant some evidence to take them into custody. You can even extort the owner of a local shop to give you some money. With the right combinations of threats and abuse they will give in and give you some cash. You do have to be careful though. Doing too many bad things can get you a demotion. You need to keep your rank up with the police department for various reasons, but one of the most important is your level of access. New weapons and cars are only available to skilled and respected officers. You have to become one, and stay one, if you want to use it.
You will also get upgrades to your attacks and special moves as well. This means you have to be careful about whom you kill and how many innocent people you abuse. Running over innocent people gets you bad points, killing officers gets you bad points, killing criminals that don�t deserve it gets you bad points, and the list goes on and on. You don�t always have to be good, and the negative points you get rarely over take the good points you get if you stop the criminals, but you have to be cautious. You will find it unavoidable at times, like when your car gets rammed and you run over a group of people crossing the street. Just stay on the good side most of the time, and you won�t have a problem.
The story is basically this: You are on a mission to find and stop the people that killed your mentor, and partner. Along the way you will find yourself encountering numerous gangs and other criminals. The story line is actually quite interesting and the voice-overs and cut scenes all complement the game very well. They are not too over done, but are long enough to continue the story. Which is why it is sad that the control isn�t so great. This game really does have a great deal of positive aspects, unfortunately the control just gets in the way so much of the time. It is one of the only games available the regularly use all of the buttons on the Xbox controller. Yes, even the back, white, and black buttons will be used for quite a few things such as picking up weapons, opening doors, firing warning shots, traversing menus, and more. This is probably only a little awkward at first since most players don�t have the coordination of pushing those buttons that often. Once you get used to it, most of it becomes simpler, well except for the back button. Trying to catch someone or flag down a car while moving and trying to press the black button becomes very difficult. But even once you get the hang of it actually getting Marcus to do what you want isn�t always so easy. For example, when you break up a brawl in a dinner most of the innocent patrons try to rush out the door. The AI doesn�t really know where the door is, only the general vicinity so you have a huge mob of people walking back and forth in front of the door. Well if you are trying to apprehend someone and they make a break for it they run for the door as well (and for some reason are much better at getting out, though not always).
Trying to grab one particular person in a group is next to impossible since unless you are directly facing someone and there is no one else around and you push the button at the right time you won�t get the one you want. And then if you do grab the wrong person it takes to long to grab them and let go of them and the person you were trying to grab is now out on the streets. This scenario brings up one of the most annoying and most fun parts of the game. There is no run feature of the game, or rather, Marcus is always running, but there is no way to run faster. So if you are after two people that are running and say you catch one, you might have to fight him until he surrenders. Once he does that you have to get him on the ground and arrest him. By this time the other person may have gotten too far away. So let�s say you just subdue the first character and then run after the second. By the time you catch him, the other person has gotten away. Why is this? Marcus runs at approximately 1 MPH faster than any criminal, which means it takes forever to catch him (and by forever I mean about 5 or 6 city blocks). Since there is no way to sprint you simply have to run after him, until you catch him. It is far too time-consuming and far too annoying.
Once you actually catch him, however, things are a lot more fun. You can press the B button while running to perform a diving take down, which is probably one of the best features of the game. And once you take them down you can beat their rotten head against the asphalt until your heart�s content.
Driving vehicles in the game is done pretty well, especially the power braking. The only other notable thing about the driving system is that you have the ability to shoot while driving. Why do this when you can just run them over? I don�t know, but it�s nice to have the option. You will find pretty quickly though, that driving around isn�t really the best way to progress in the game. Sure your rank will increase faster since you are being stopped every few blocks to arrest someone, but the city in this game is so large that it is nearly impossible to drive the whole thing yourself. Luckily you can jump into the back of any taxicab and they will take you anywhere you want to go. Of course, you can take the subway too, but the stops are limited. The subway is cheaper than a cab though, so I guess it just depends on how fast you need to be there and how much cash you have.
All of these elements together make the game pretty enjoyable overall, but it just has the feeling that it was rushed, probably for the holiday season. I think they would have been a lot better off pushing the date back a few weeks and worked out some of the controls. It would have really helped the game, and it would have probably helped sales. The story is good and there are tons of things you can do, but it�s just not quite as fun doing them when you can�t control the game exactly as you want to.
The Big Apple in all it�s Splendor
Following in the True Crime tradition the developers went through every means available to try to perfectly re-create the entire island of Manhattan. This game is huge. As you drive through the city you�ll see skyscrapers, low-rises, debris in the streets, the subway, central park, bums, prostitutes, every day Joes, taxi cabs, hot dog stands, you name it. If it is in New York City in real life, it�s here in the game. With a game this extensive you begin to quickly realize that you simply can�t have an environment this large without sacrificing something. Luckily the graphics don�t suffer too much. Your character model is probably the best in the game. Most of the other people you meet, especially the people on the street tend to be fairly polygonal, though you do begin to get used to it after a little bit of playing. The car models are pretty good for game in this genre and the damage modeling is also pretty impressive.
Probably the most impressive part is the actual city itself. The streets look really good and it is impressive how much diversity they put in city to make it actually look the way New York really looks. But even with all of this detail the game still has a long way to go in the graphics department. First of all, there are far too many aliasing issues than need be, especially on an Xbox game. The Xbox is at the end of it�s life span and games are supposed to look the best on the console right now. Unfortunately the game is just too big to be able to fit it all in. You begin to notice aliasing issues as soon as you start driving around the city, that and pop up. The draw distance is pretty decent; you can easily see several blocks ahead of you, and it�s probably better than most other games in the genre, but it�s still there and it�s definitely noticeable. Luckily the pop up is almost entirely limited to the environment on the horizon, but even if you get used to that, you still have to deal with the poor frame rate. I hand it to the developers for trying to make a game simulating New York City but I think this game perfectly shows how today�s console technology just isn�t quite capable of handling it. It�s indeed rare to encounter noticeable slow down on the Xbox, but this game has its fair share. There are simply too many cars and people and buildings to load. To be honest I wouldn�t mind if they took out the overabundance of debris on the streets and maybe cut down on the pedestrians a little to get that frame rate back up.
That being said we move on the reflections on the vehicles which simply don�t exist, or rather are very poorly simulated. Since the reflections don�t really look like reflections, I would probably rather them take them out than have it in there slowing the game down. Another thing that is sorely missed is shadows. Imagine how pretty the city of New York would be in a game, driving down Broadway at sunset seeing every long shadow of every tall building, car, tree, and person. Unfortunately the Xbox probably couldn�t handle that, even if there was nothing else to the game, but any attempt would have been better than none. Despite the game lacking graphically it isn�t a bad looking game. You will spend most of your time driving around at high speeds and running down crooks so you won�t even notice it most of the time. One nice touch is that the environment is pretty destructible and the interior of the buildings has so much stuff you mess up like computers, bookshelves, filing cabinets, etc. This game is definitely a step in the right direction. It�s really good to see games not only becoming more realistic visually but also more realistically based when it comes to the city and the cars and such. Fictional cities may be fun for running around and blowing stuff up, but there is nothing like flying down the New York City streets in a NYPD cruiser with sirens blaring.
Luckily it Doesn�t Sound Exactly Like New York.
Making this game sound like the authentic New York City streets would just have given everyone a headache. They did a good job of picking which sounds to add, and which ones to get rid of. All of the car sounds are decent. They aren�t anything to marvel over, but they do the job and they sound like they are supposed to. The voice-overs on all the main characters are done well and are very well suited to that character. They also do a good job of giving the voices a New York feel without feeling fake. The voices of the people on the streets on the other hand aren�t so great. And even the ones that do sound good get over shadowed by the fact that you�ll hear the same phrases way too many times while playing the game. I understand it is hard to give personality to that many NPC�s but it can be a little distracting at times.
Probably the best thing about the sound is the music. They did a pretty decent job selecting which artists and songs to put in the game. You might not find as many classics as you hear in the GTA series, but they are all good songs and are all well suited to the city of New York. The best feature is that you not only can access a menu to select the songs but you can rate them. All of the songs are broken up into their respective musical genres. You can go here and give each song a rating, one star being the worst, and five stars being the best. This will determine how often that particular song is played. It�s a great way to filter out music that you really don�t like, thus you can focus on game play rather than flipping through songs to find one you don�t hate.
Playing in the Streets
Despite some considerable flaws in the game play and few minor annoyances with the graphics the game is a solid title. All of the petty crimes you have to thwart are really clever and different from what you�d expect. There is enough variety that you look forward to the crimes, just to see what is next. Beating people up never gets old, in any game, and this game is no exception. Slamming someone�s head into a wall, leaving a huge bloodstain is classic and everyone can enjoy that. The multiple ways you can take down criminals or solve crimes makes the game a lot of fun and gives it a pretty high replay value.
If you are a huge fan of True Crime: Streets of L.A. or the GTA series you might want to check this game out. It will probably help quench your thirst for blood and carnage for a while. If you haven�t really ever played a game like this before it could get you into it, but you might want to rent it first to try it out before you shell out fifty clams.
Calling All Officers: We Have Plasma in Progress
Despite any flaw this title might have I do want to recognize the team that made True Crime: New York City on the good things they did. They made a great story and put that story in one of the biggest cities in the world. It is amazing to see a city like New York put into a video game. Most importantly they did enough to make the game different from other games in the same genre, giving it a brand new feel, which is always welcome. And don�t forget, as you drive down all of those streets the names of every street pops up as you pass them so you can tell exactly where you are. Even if you didn�t like video games you could always just get the game and use it as a driving simulator. Planning a trip to NYC, pick up True Crime and learn your way around before you get there and you could impress all of your friends. Think about it.
Book 'em
True Crime: New York City is a game unlike any other. It takes the best city in the world and puts in the palm of your hand. You get to clean up the streets and have fun at the same time. The ability to be a bad cop offers variation in the game play so that it isn�t boring and you�re never punished that much so you can still have fun and do it your way. The control scheme takes some getting used to so don�t immediately put it down if you�re turned off at first, give it a shot. The graphics are decent, but by no means ground breaking but it does have a good story and some excellent characterization. Even if you only play it at a friend's house, try it at least once, otherwise you might be missing out.
