The structure of the game is laid out by the 'investigation' of various leads, each one taking you to another moment in the storyline. Although immediately visually striking, True Crime trips over its own inflated Nikes with just a few too many moments of lamentable emptiness. Sadly these young pixel-folk are trapped in a world where nothing is much fun.
Yes, the urban decay has been applied with artistic love, and the muscular thugs who make each other's lives a little shorter are convincingly acted and beautifully rendered. Virtual tourism at its most ugly - and that's a good thing. This is a game in which just walking down the street feels good: you soak up ambience and occasionally shoot someone in the face, just for kicks. Visually, New York City is constantly impressive: litter whirls through the air and arguments break out on the trash-strewn sidewalk as your saunter casually by. The streets feel gritty, and the driving sections and pedestrian action blend beautifully. "Is the gun small, or are my hands enormous?"Īnyway, True Crime: New York City is grungy, detailed and well animated. I got better, but it was still only fun in the way that flailing helplessly as you drunkenly fall down a hole is fun. Finally, I turn around and accidentally rugby-tackled one of the fleeing pedestrians, before beating him in the face. Taking careful aim I gun down the hostage, the gunman and a nearby policeman as I struggle for control of the fine-tuned aiming. Perplexed by the overly complex controls I first punch out a fat bystander in the crowd, then pull out my gun and fire uselessly at some shop windows. Soon there is a man holding a gun to a woman's head. Take these initial moments where I stepped outside the training missions and onto the streets of the freeform city section: I am ordered to resolve some street crime and so leave the precinct to walk down the street.
True Crime is awesome, if it's actually a simulation of "Mr Magoo on PCP". Initial forays into the city were mixed with incompetence and bewilderment at the obfuscatory controls. The guns blaze, the corpses topple, you character strolls and New York is looking promisingly GTA-like. Sadly though there are no pills that ease the pain of poor game design, especially when the really very pretty opening sequences of New York City raise your hopes that maybe, just maybe, the next few hours aren't going to be a carefully-scripted waste of time. You almost expect to see Max Payne sprinting past in slow motion. It's that caricature of graffiti and ultra-violence that Mayor Giuliani worked so hard to erase, and that videogames and cheap thrillers insist on hyping up as a lawless gangster genocide zone.
Four hundred dollar shoes are replaced with dodgy early-90s trainers, while caviar and champagne sex exploits on 5th Avenue are replaced with Uzis and crack pipes in the ghetto. The sequel to True Crime takes place in that semi-fictional New York that seems to exist in a polar-opposite dimension to that of Sex And The City.