Action out the yin yang

I had some expectations of the game, but I wasn't expecting it to be the holy grail or anything. I've played GTA games and loved them, I have enjoyed the open ended nature of the games and the size of the environment.

The biggest selling point of this game was the fact that they took all of LA and packed it into the game disc. I would be more impressed if I'd been in LA recently enough to tell you if it were well done or not.

Where GTA has varying missions, and you can play them at your own pace for your own reasons, True Crime has one story line that branches in three places. It's one solid storyline, they did a pretty good job with it, and it's only silly in one place. The branches of the storyline each have an ending, for a total of three, each one progressively more satisfying; aka the guy gets away, the guy gets killed, you kill the guy and exact your revenge. The best part of this is, if you can't beat a mission, you can actually continue and the storyline will adjust to the fact that you didn't beat everything.

The game play is phenomenal. Unlike the GTA port onto the xbox, which has some gaps and some problems, True Crime is great from beginning to end. It doesn't hang up, no clipping errors, no flaws as far as I could tell. The game design is just the kind of thing I like, it has some shooting levels, some sniping levels, some stealth sections, and lots of driving.

Each of the skills you need for the above sections, shooting, fighting, etc, are upgradable with points that you earn for arresting people and completing missions. You can learn better fighting moves, better guns, learn better cornering tactics, and so on. It adds a vague sense of RPG to the game that is missing from games like GTA.

All told, the story aspect of the game is entertaining, as is just crusing around, but the more story focused nature of the game makes it less likely you will cruise around for hours as you might have in GTA. You certainly can, but my attention was on beating the game, and once the storyline was beaten I didn't feel like searching around LA for hours.

The value of this game may be questionable then, since it is not as replayable as the GTA games. However, it is a more reliable game, operation-wise, on the xbox. A terrific rental, so far as I was concerned.

One thing to point out, at around the 3/4 point of the game, it becomes like Big Trouble in Little China for two missions, with dragons, zombies, demons and an immortal chinese guy with long fingernails. Weird.

The dialogue is clever, the two fisted gunmanship is great, the cars are awesome, there are babes, explosions, drugs and strippers. What more could you ask for?

A really recommended game. The non replayability and the weird mythical chinese crap were the only things that kept me from rating this game five stars.

Play it.

Thanks for reading.