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True Crime: Streets of L.A. Preview for Xbox
Posted on Thursday, October 16, 2003 @ 02:53:00 pm E.S.T True Crime: Streets of L.A. is an action game that is often compared to the likes of GTA, and for good reason. Both are third person games that combine shooting, driving and fighting. However, where GTA was plain, True Crime expands.
You play as Nick Kang, a recently dismissed police officer [he was fired due to use of excessive force]. Nick has been ordered to discover a huge money-laundering scheme being operated by the Chinese and the Russian mafia. Nick will encounter hitmen and all sorts of grunts and thugs.
The graphics are impressive, but more impressively, almost all of L.A. has been transplanted into the game world. You’ll be able to find landmarks, such as the famous Hollywood sign. Everything from West Hollywood to L.A. to Beverly Hills has been realistically represented in Streets of L.A. Even back alleys and streets are much like their real-life counterpart. There are 300 square miles in all to perform your duties in.
There is a strong emphasis on trying to cut down on load times, one of the issues that plagued GTA. On the PS2 and GC the load times are short at times where you do things such as enter and exit buildings. On the Xbox, there will be seamless transitions in these situations.
In the PlayStation 2 version, you’ll move around using the left analog stick, while the right stick will be used for aiming weapons. However, there will be an auto-aim feature, which is often extremely useful due to the extremely fast-paced gameplay. The X and O buttons will operate kick and punch functions. The R2 button with rotate your weapons in and out, and R1 will fire guns.
You'll be able to target enemies and cars while driving.
An interesting ability is to be able to wield two weapons at once, although they do not have to be the same. You can use both a pistol and a shotgun, or a shotgun and an assault rifle at the same time, for example. You can even target two enemies and shoot at them both! In addition, there will be cool moves such as diving and shooting in slow motion, a la Max Payne.
The fighting, non-weapon portion of the game consists of martial arts and kicking ass. You’ll be able to wield all sorts of items you find in the environment such as tables, chairs, windows, pool sticks, etc. These items will even wear down and break after use. There will be counter-attacks, parries, superblows and finishers, with a fighting system that has the depth of many wrestling games.
Most of the time you will be on the streets of L.A., hence the title. Nick’s original car is a black convertible, although you will be able to ‘borrow’ one of the 30 other cars on the road for you to drive. You’ll do this by going near the car and pressing the L1 button. While no licensed cars have been announced yet, there is still a possibility of some being included in the final version of the game. The driving system is far from complex; you will accelerate and decelerate using the left analog stick, and you will steer using the right stick. Also much like in GTA, you will have a mini-map that will work in a similar fashion: it will guide you through L.A., and mark special locations. You can crash and damage basically everything you see on the street, but at the current time there is one extremely noticeable and irritating glitch: if you enter and exit a building, everything outside will be reset to its original form and position.
You'll be able to use bullet time-esque moves.
Whenever a crime occurs, such as a drive-by shooting, mugging, carjacking, etc., a red arrow will appear over the criminal’s head. Often solving these missions is merely done by shooting the criminal. This will achieve you badge points, which can be spent on improving Nick’s moves. One such example is the ability to stop a local dojo and learn new karate moves.
Once you have earned enough points to begin practicing one of these moves, you will then have to challenge a dojo master. Once you defeat the dojo master, you will be able to use these moves in the rest of the game. In addition to these dojos, there will be shooting ranges to improve your weapon skills and auto shops to improve your driving skills. Practicing at the shooting range will enhance your targeting skills allowing you to target multiple items, perform the fore mentioned slow motion dive attack or even be able to attack certain areas of an enemy’s body.
Everything you do while playing will effect the ending you get, even things that occur when you aren’t on a mission. When you encounter characters in the game, you have the ability to kill them -- and they will stay dead.
Here are some examples of the non-linear ends of the game:
Targeting is extremely precise in True Crime.
If you're on a mission where you're supposed to follow a suspect to a certain location, you're still free to do what you please during that time. That is, if you decide to ram the suspect's car off the road, yank him out of his car and fill him up with hollow points, you're more than welcome to, and it won't result in a "mission failed" message. But your aggressive action is recorded by the game and taken into account. Furthermore, you never got to the location you were supposed to, so you won't know what was there waiting for you. But supposed you chase him down, yank him out of his car and arrest him instead of killing him? He could give you the information you needed anyway, and you didn't have to bother following him all over the map first.
You will never actually fail a mission; in a stealth mission if you are discovered, you’ll just need to kill all of the thugs that come to deal you out some pain.
The game will most likely auto-save after completing missions, as well as offering areas in the city to save manually. Nothing is in stone just yet, however.
True Crime certainly looks like it should be compared to GTA, although it very well seems as if it could be better. We’ll see this fall, when it’s released for Gamecube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox.
Preview By: Chris Pereira - 2031 Reads
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