True Crime: New York City
Truly disappointing.
Published: December 2, 2005
This is nothing compared to what happens when you get behind the wheel of a fire truck, though. You can flash your badge and the fire men in cops’ uniforms will happily get out and let you get in, ignoring the fact that you’ve clearly never driven a fire truck before, and then let you tear ass through the city. Since none of the vehicles really feel like they’re going fast – and the fire truck is a sloth of a vehicle – it’s sheer unintentional comedy to smash into cars at what feels like 20 miles an hour and watch them spin at physically impossible speeds off a couple hundred feet.
Seriously, you tap a car and it goes flying, and while it’s fun at first, you’ll quickly note that 90% of the drivers in New York apparently don’t wear their seatbelts, because they go flying through the windshield and right under your front tire, which dings you quite nicely on your whole good cop/bad cop meter.
I also had no idea that the entire Manhattan area featured more look-alike Crown Victorias than the freaking assembly plants at Ford. The Crown Vics outnumber any other car by about 10 to 1, and since they share the same coma-inducing speed and dumptruck-on-ice physics, actually commandeering a car ends up being a pain in the ass and you’re forced to arrest perps to earn money and increase your rank so you can buy new cars, but then you have to deal with the crappy interaction.
For all the work that went into beefing up the engine and the visuals, it’s still awfully weird looking. Yes, the detail on the city streets, the different boroughs and the overall texture work is quite nice, but for all millions of newspapers and garbage flitting around in the street (and they get blown around by passing cars, which is a nice touch) and the detail that went into making the city feel different, there are too many glaring problems. For one, shadows are rendered about five feet in front of you, and in low detail, so you can walk about and just watch them get drawn in with a clear line.
And then of course there’s the framerate. This is no doubt part of the reason why cars feel so sluggish, but it’s always choppy (save for most indoor environments, though they certainly aren’t exempt). When just a few cars and people are on screen at once, the framerate nosedives even more, exhibiting some of the worst slowdown I’ve ever seen in a game on the PS2. There’s also a weird sense of see-sawing speed in cars, where they feel like they’re slowing down and speeding up slightly, even on flat ground.
The audio fares a little better, but not by much. Climb into that fire truck or participate in one of the street races (which you can’t quit out of unless you blow up your car) and you’ll near Marcus recite the same line over and over again. The voice acting as a whole is really quite solid, but the lines the actors had to read either end up feeling trite and overly clichéd, or just don’t use any of the real talent the actors possess.
When people like Christopher Walken or Lawrence Fishburne end up sounding like just another character despite their familiar cadence and sound, it’s makes them sound like they just phoned in all the lines and walked out with a paycheck. Walken’s performance is nowhere near as good as it was in the last game, despite having a far cooler character this time around.
The soundtrack is understandably urban, but there was an attempt to mix things up with some rock and house tracks, as well as a few classic ones (and you can buy more than what’s available at the start from different stores that sell their own unique tunes), and from what I could tell, the list is almost entirely made up of New York artists, which is a nice touch.
You’re given a Windows Media Player or iPod level of control over how much you like songs, so voting them down to no stars will prevent them from playing at all, and five will cause them to crop up a lot more often. There’s no way to pick a certain type of music, but you can rewind back to the start of a track you like by pressing left on the d-pad.
The music in the cutscenes usually ends up being lightly scratched turntable maneuvers over some ambient swells, and since the cutscenes themselves don’t tend to go for very long, you’ll come to welcome the familiar high-energy scratched outro to most scenes. The sound effects have an equally warm feel to them, at least in the guns, but you’ll really have to strain to hear any throat from the cars themselves.
The simple fact is that this game just doesn’t feel done. There are too many minor things that add up to an immersion robbing experience, and it quickly chips away at all the fun parts of the game. The story feels half-assed, the gameplay is spotty and uneven, and the bugs systematically destroy any progress towards sucking you into the city that the game tries to make. This is just a mess, and a huge step backward from the last game.
If Luxoflux needed more time or simply doesn’t have the programming chops to make a game this ambitious, I can’t really say, but when so many of the fundamentals are busted, there’s just no reason to even worry about it. Just stay away and you’ll be a much happier person.
