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True Crime: New York City What's the difference between True Crime: New York City and a quarry full of rap music? None: they're both gritty, an eyesore, and full of rap music.
Like its LA-based predecessor, the game is comprised entirely of a toughened skin stretched over a mangled and calcium-deficient GTA skeleton. You play Marcus Read, a young black cop with a dark past who tries to uncover a conspiracy centering on yada-yada-yada, enough already. Hey I’m walking here! You want a bagel? It’s third-person, you have guns and cars, you can climb and jump. There’s a lot of swearing and cutscenes with famous people’s voices in them. Nobody cares apart from the fourteen-year-old boys who might actually buy this game.
The carnival of fun begins with an interminable tutorial, which guides you through the tiresome repertoire of grappling, slapping, shooting and diving that dear Marcus must employ to achieve his laudable aims. It’s a serious pain, and couldn’t do less to deflect accusations of paint-by-numbers game design. Your character feels like a lumbering idiot, swaying and bumbling his way around knocking stuff over. The cars, when you finally get to drive one, are ugly, heavy and so sluggish they feel like slug-drawn carriages traversing a road comprised entirely of slugs. Shooting, as third person shooting on a console goes, is not too terrible, but it’s hardly Max Payne, and that game is five years old.
So, I’m out of the first tutorial (having passed with “flying fucking colours”, apparently) and Mickey Rourke (well, Mickey Rourke’s voice) takes me out on the street to show me some ropes. We never get to see them: all we see are some angry bloated people with orange bars above their heads, and it’s at this point that the game does something stupid.
I’m chasing down a perp who hops into a car to drive away. “Commandeer a car, man!” (or something) shouts Mickey Rourke in my ear as I continue to pursue the offender on foot to see where he’s driving, in order that I might then acquire said vehicular pursuit mechanism and set off in...pursuit. “Where are you going?” shouts Mickey Rourke, I see MISSION FAILED, and I’m forced to replay an entire segment in which I was required to slap a fat man repeatedly on the back of the neck for several minutes. Is that fun? Aren’t games supposed to be fun?
You see, I don’t think this game was really made for people to actually play, I think it was conceived as an experience. It is fun to experience being a cop, rough people up and arrest them. Some of the minor missions, such as wading into a violent altercation between a pimp and his young female companions of dubious morality, are pretty entertaining. Getting instructions over the radio, leaping into a car and then screeching to a halt discharging a side-arm from the window is a slightly different experience to GTA, and is far from dull. You can search people, sometimes they have drugs and porn on them, and they say something funny, then you kick them in the head. It’s OK, and all this means that True Crime can’t really be judged objectively as a real, proper turkey, because there is some enjoyment in there for your inner-moron.
But, of course, small problems still crouch in the alleyways. Bugs in some missions, a lot of repetition of “random” elements, complete absolute gibberish-nonsense-Dada moments such as walking up to a cop and punching him in the head while he says, “It’s ok, you’re a badge”, over and over again, then simply allows you to walk away: these all contribute to a faint surrealism which completely belies the grit. One aspect in particular which caused me so much delight I had to share it with anyone in the vicinity of the console: you’re a policeman, and you can commandeer police cars by waving your badge in front of them, and shouting “New York Police!” When your hapless colleague gets out, he will often flip you the bird with exactly the same animation as a civilian. That’s some real immersion right there.
So, it appears that nobody cared about how this game was played, particularly. The experience of being in the city is fun: the city is big, it looks like New York, it takes you a long time to drive around it. You can drive in Central Park. You can drive in Times Square. It all looks fine in a kind of crappy PS2 way, but then I don’t need to remind anyone that Shadow of the Colossus is also a PS2 game, and graphically eats True Crime for every meal including brunch. And, worse, the real New York just wasn’t designed to be particularly fun to drive around. True Crime’s repetitive, flat-looking NY pales in comparison to the delights of a San Andreas or Liberty City.
There are plenty of games that you just can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to play, and this isn’t one of them. The plot is of sufficient quality to be mildly interesting, and the voice acting and incredibly high-rent soundtrack (try Run DMC, Sugarhill Gang and further raft of classic rap tracks on for size) keep of the aesthetic side of everything enough to be a slight pull.
But, really, really do we still need titles like this? Developers have to stop making weak games solely to support an aesthetic which publishers think will make money. It’s that simple. There’s nothing wrong with having an aesthetic which will make money. But also there’s nothing stopping any serious publishers from investing enough time and money in a project to produce at least an interesting game, despite the constant perpetuation of industry myths to the contrary.
Given the choice, I'd rather spend time in a quarry full of rap music. Word.
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