True Crime: New York City
We cruised the streets of New York and all we brought back was this lousy preview.
Published: October 20, 2005
Poor Luxoflux. All they ever wanted was a little love, but they had to go and make a game like True Crime: Streets of LA, which was good in its own right, but there was way too much of a GTA vibe about the game that got in the way of an entertaining story and a fun cop character in Nick Kang. Oh, and then there was the whole dragon thing.
Still, as we said in our review "Luxoflux has the makings of a very serious GTA-level contender here. If only they could smooth out the rough spots," and we still think that. Of course, they could just scrap most of the stuff from the last game and start fresh with a better engine, more streamlined combat and more stuff to do. That works too.
For starters, they decided to do away with nearly everything about the setting of the last game, jettisoning smartass cop Nick Kang and moved things across the country to New York. More specifically, they're placing things in Manhattan, and letting you fill the size 14s of one Marcus Reed.
Marcus' daddy is a big-time crime boss, and as the game starts out (and we got our first taste of the combat system), Marcus is perfectly happy in his life of crime. Okay, not perfectly happy since the man's covered in blood and apparently out for revenge when we finally got the reins on him, but he's, uh, trigger happy. Yes, that fits nicely. Good pun, us.
In a nice little twist, the game just turns you loose, weapons akimbo and lets you tear ass through a slumhouse with a pair of submachine guns. The first thing that becomes obvious is the way the game handles combat, or more specifically how it lets you beat and shoot your enemies.
A free-aiming reticule paints your target as you'd expect from any 3rd-person shooter (think Max Payne, but also offers the first game's ability to slow time and zoom in on strategic weak points (arms, legs, torso or head) to take down enemies with more precision. Also included is a simple lock-on feature, with allows for circle strafing and is best used in conjunction with the melee and martial arts movies Marcus sports.
Yes, he's plenty capable of learning kung fu, karate, wushu, Thai boxing and good ol' street brawling - as much so as Nick Kang, but it'll take stops into dojos and some training to earn them. For us, though, it was all about shooting stuff and we happily did, stopping only to replace our clips.
Once the shootout was over and the rival gang member slain, we were introduced to Terry Higgins, Marcus' father's friend. Marcus' father's cop friend. It's clear the two go way back and he's something of a big brother or second father to Marcus as he verbally slaps him around a bit (completely with delightfully course language), and tells him to clean up.
Clean up our boy Marcus does indeed, going from street thug to full-fledged blues-wearing cop in the span of a few years, and while he catches a little flack from some of the more established cops in the precinct, he still passes his test with flying colors (thanks to us, of course) and it's where we learned the ins and outs of melee and firearms combat, as well as how Luxoflux tweaked the driving bits to be a little more fun.
The cars still control, well, oddly. It's not too hard to lose complete control, but there are more options for handbrake use, and the actual controls themselves feel much more responsive. This of course comes in handy while screaming through the streets of New York, which itself is in a constant state of flux.
In addition to all the little extra goodies you can participate in (like solving random crimes, much like the first game, or street races, which are new to this one), there's a constant turf war going on, and you have the option to help quell uprisings and clean up the city one section at a time. The state of the city itself is reflected in the buildings, which can become boarded up and the peds far more aggressive when crime gets out of hand.
The fact that you're free to more or less act as you please is one of the game's core carryovers. There's no longer a massively branching storyline with wildly different outcomes, but in a way that's a good thing. While streamlined, you can still fail most missions and the game will keep right on truckin' (like the last game, you'll just have to get the relevant info from somewhere or someone else).
Unfortunately, due to environmental factors (like, say, a TV cranked up right effing next to us), we didn't get a chance to delve a little deeper into the different weapons, dig on the soundtrack, explore the overarching storyline itself, and didn't get a chance to explore much of the city beyond what a couple kind Activision/Luxoflux reps were able to fill us in on.
Since we have an unnatural aversion to regurgitating fact sheets, we're going to just have to wait to get more hands-on time with the game to really deliver the goods. Expect that shortly, and for now check out the screens and movies we've assembled.
Still, as we said in our review "Luxoflux has the makings of a very serious GTA-level contender here. If only they could smooth out the rough spots," and we still think that. Of course, they could just scrap most of the stuff from the last game and start fresh with a better engine, more streamlined combat and more stuff to do. That works too.
For starters, they decided to do away with nearly everything about the setting of the last game, jettisoning smartass cop Nick Kang and moved things across the country to New York. More specifically, they're placing things in Manhattan, and letting you fill the size 14s of one Marcus Reed.
Marcus' daddy is a big-time crime boss, and as the game starts out (and we got our first taste of the combat system), Marcus is perfectly happy in his life of crime. Okay, not perfectly happy since the man's covered in blood and apparently out for revenge when we finally got the reins on him, but he's, uh, trigger happy. Yes, that fits nicely. Good pun, us.
In a nice little twist, the game just turns you loose, weapons akimbo and lets you tear ass through a slumhouse with a pair of submachine guns. The first thing that becomes obvious is the way the game handles combat, or more specifically how it lets you beat and shoot your enemies.
A free-aiming reticule paints your target as you'd expect from any 3rd-person shooter (think Max Payne, but also offers the first game's ability to slow time and zoom in on strategic weak points (arms, legs, torso or head) to take down enemies with more precision. Also included is a simple lock-on feature, with allows for circle strafing and is best used in conjunction with the melee and martial arts movies Marcus sports.
Yes, he's plenty capable of learning kung fu, karate, wushu, Thai boxing and good ol' street brawling - as much so as Nick Kang, but it'll take stops into dojos and some training to earn them. For us, though, it was all about shooting stuff and we happily did, stopping only to replace our clips.
Once the shootout was over and the rival gang member slain, we were introduced to Terry Higgins, Marcus' father's friend. Marcus' father's cop friend. It's clear the two go way back and he's something of a big brother or second father to Marcus as he verbally slaps him around a bit (completely with delightfully course language), and tells him to clean up.
Clean up our boy Marcus does indeed, going from street thug to full-fledged blues-wearing cop in the span of a few years, and while he catches a little flack from some of the more established cops in the precinct, he still passes his test with flying colors (thanks to us, of course) and it's where we learned the ins and outs of melee and firearms combat, as well as how Luxoflux tweaked the driving bits to be a little more fun.
The cars still control, well, oddly. It's not too hard to lose complete control, but there are more options for handbrake use, and the actual controls themselves feel much more responsive. This of course comes in handy while screaming through the streets of New York, which itself is in a constant state of flux.
In addition to all the little extra goodies you can participate in (like solving random crimes, much like the first game, or street races, which are new to this one), there's a constant turf war going on, and you have the option to help quell uprisings and clean up the city one section at a time. The state of the city itself is reflected in the buildings, which can become boarded up and the peds far more aggressive when crime gets out of hand.
The fact that you're free to more or less act as you please is one of the game's core carryovers. There's no longer a massively branching storyline with wildly different outcomes, but in a way that's a good thing. While streamlined, you can still fail most missions and the game will keep right on truckin' (like the last game, you'll just have to get the relevant info from somewhere or someone else).
Unfortunately, due to environmental factors (like, say, a TV cranked up right effing next to us), we didn't get a chance to delve a little deeper into the different weapons, dig on the soundtrack, explore the overarching storyline itself, and didn't get a chance to explore much of the city beyond what a couple kind Activision/Luxoflux reps were able to fill us in on.
Since we have an unnatural aversion to regurgitating fact sheets, we're going to just have to wait to get more hands-on time with the game to really deliver the goods. Expect that shortly, and for now check out the screens and movies we've assembled.
