True Crime: New York City Review

2003’s True Crime: Streets of LA was a decent-but-flawed take on the GTA-style of gameplay and it showed quite a bit of promise. Fast forward two years and Luxoflux and Activision have produced a follow-up game set in New York City. The game features a good story and a great digital version of Manhattan, but the graphics and gameplay are decidedly worse than in Streets of LA. Simply put, True Crime: New York City is pretty disappointing.

Story

The game follows Marcus Reed, a one time gang banger who became a cop after he and his father barely survived an attempted murder. He is part of the Organized Crime Division of the NYPD so he is responsible for tracking down and taking out the leaders of New York City’s various crime syndicates. The story is a rather typical tale of revenge and redemption out in the tough NYC streets. Even though it is clichéd and predictable, it is a heck of a lot better than the story in Streets of LA so the game has that going for it at least.

The main storyline includes four major cases and they all play out pretty much the same way. You get a tip about a perp. Track them down. Interrogate them. Use that info to find the next one. And repeat until you get to the boss. The individual missions are a bit more varied than that, but the basic pattern repeats throughout. The missions are surprisingly easy, though, and you can finish up the story in just a few hours.

Explore the City

Luckily, there is a lot more to see and do in the NYC than just focusing on the story. In between the normal missions, you are also responsible for taking care of street crimes. You’ll get calls on your radio about all sorts of different crimes and it is your job to go to that location and making arrests or whatever else you have to do to keep the peace. You can fire warning shots in the air, frisk suspects, and handcuff suspects. You can also check cars for contraband. And if you are feeling naughty, you can plant evidence on people and arrest them. You earn a paycheck in True Crime and your pay is determined by your rank as well as bonuses you earn from turning in evidence (or you can take it to a pawn shop and sell it). You can spend that money on cars or to up your stats for fighting and shooting. There are also illegal street racing circuits you can enter as well as fight arenas you can compete in. Of course, you can also just drive around and explore NYC which is pretty cool because this is as detailed of a map of Manhattan as you are going to find in a videogame.

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