I will admit that this game has been out for awhile, but it was recently recommended to me and I tried it out, here is my review.
Platform: X-Box
Rating: 8.5 out of 10
Game Type: Action
Overview:
This is a game where you can make society whatever you want it to be. You are a police detective for the NYPD and your job is to solve crime in New York City. There is a main mission for those who want to get through the story quickly, and you are always told where to go in order to complete the different scenarios that comprise the main mission.
For the more adventurous of us, there are random calls that come out from dispatch that give you crimes to solve unrelated to the main mission. In addition to that, you can frisk any random civilian you like for weapons or drugs, with or without due cause, but the odds of actually finding anything on a random frisk are around one in fifteen, so it is mostly a waste of time.
Another side quest is to clean up the crime in various precincts in New York, and how clean any given precinct is will be obvious because the cleaner it is, the lighter the color. There is some benefit to cleaning up these precincts because different stores and locations will be open to you as the precinct becomes cleaner.
You get experience points for every crime you resolve, or person you arrest. Even if you plant evidence on someone and then arrest them, you still get experience points. Experience points are necessary because there are five different detective ranks, and the higher your rank, the better cars/guns that you are able to buy and the higher quality special moves you are capable of.
All the killing…None of the paperwork
The point of this game is that you can handle crime in whatever way you deem appropriate. You can use your bare fists in order to neutralize a perpetrator, you can use a light or heavy weapon to try to knock them out, or you can shoot them. The game makes it possible for you to shoot them in the arms or legs for a neutralizing shot, which will down your opponent while earning you good cop points and giving you the opportunity to make an arrest.
I find it more fun to be a bad cop. For instance, if there is a gang brawl going on, the easiest and quickest way to solve a crime is to run over all of them with my automobile, they are all dead and I get my experience points. Besides, they should not have joined a gang anyway.
If there is a domestic going on somewhere, I find it appropriate to go in and shoot both of the parties involved. He should not have abused his wife and she should have known enough to recognize her husband’s abusinve tendencies prior to wedding him. Clearly he is a spouse-abuser and she is an idiot, hence, I kill them both.
If there is a bank hold-up, then I will go in and kill the person holding up the bank clerk, and then I will kill the bank clerk for being a pain in my ass and making me go and save her.
Not only will all of these things earn you experience points, but provided you minimize how many people you kill that are not responsible for the incident, you will be all right. However, going around killing innocent civilians will get you deemed a, “rogue,” cop and you will be hunted down and killed.
Game over…I think not.
In this game, you have unlimited lives and are incapable of permanently dying, there is never a game over. In fact, the only time that you really lose anything as a result of dying is if you were working on a quest in the main mission, in which event, you simply return to the beginning of the quest.
If you are killed while rogue, (there is a meter on the right-bottom of your screen and if your rogue meter goes past 3/6 bars, you are considered a rogue cop. If you are at 2/6 bars, the cops will still attack you, but they will not really go out of their way to go after you) you will be temporarily demoted to beat patrol where you must make three, “good cop,” arrests (no planting evidence, or killing anyone) and then you will be returned to detective status.
The game will expect you to immediately continue with the main mission after your beat patrol duty provided you make three good cop arrests, you can avoid doing so by saving your game, and then loading it. When you do this, you will be back in your detective clothes, but you will not be forced into continuing with the mission.
Which is good, because the main mission is one of only two downsides to this game. The problem with the main mission is that you are playing this game from the standpoint of a detective, but you do not have to solve anything. 95% of the various quests that make up the main mission have you just going around and shooting people. There are a few booby traps hidden here and there, but nothing really to figure out. It almost defeats the purpose of being a detective.
The gameplay is pretty smooth and the controls are programmable, but this is actually one of the few games where the default control setting seems the easiest to command. There are many interesting and intricate little features to this game that you will discover as you play it. (i.e. the ability to change point of view when driving) The graphics are very sophisticated for the X-Box, although, there are only about thirty or forty different looks for non-essential characters, but what can you expect?
The one thing I did notice about this game is that randomization is key. With many games, if you go down a street at any given time you will see the same people, the same cars, and the same things going on, but in this game, everything is constantly moving and changing.
The only other flaw this game has is that it is prone to freezing up, or sometimes it will overload itself and your map of the city (bottom left corner) will temporarily disappear, it is usually self-correcting and takes only a minute but can be a pain if you are chasing someone or heading to a specific location.
For all of this, I give True Crime: New York City an 8.5 out of 10. The top features being excellent graphics, good randomization, good controls, and the random mission concept can keep you entertained for a few hours. The only flaws to this game are intermittent freezing and a weak main mission and storyline.
Think you’re a gang-banging hard-core thug?
My tactical shotgun says otherwise.