True Crime: New York City
November 21,2005 - The best thing about New York City is that you can never anticipate what will happen next. New York is all about constant surprises, making every day completely exciting. You never know what you’re going to face in the day ahead when you wake up in the morning. True Crime: New York City is the antithesis of this. Unlike the real NYC, True Crime struggles to create any sort of interesting dilemmas that challenge the player and the entire experience feels laborious, repetitive, and after extended playtime, downright boring.

The game kicks off with a short prologue, pitting you as blood-soaked Marcus Reed making an unwelcome visit to Kev Lar, a man that has betrayed you. After slaying his crew, you’re met at the scene by detective Terrence Higgins, an old family friend despite your family’s history in organized crime. Your father is an imprisoned crime boss known infamously as “King” and he plays a role in the proceedings of the game’s story later in the adventure.

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Shaking down perps in Chinatown.

Higgins takes you under his wing, and five years later, after four years dressed in blues on the street beat, you’re ready to take your detective tests. The tests serve as a sort of tutorial, introducing you to hand to hand combat, shooting, and driving. After you pass the tests, you’re accepted into the OCU (Organized Crime Unit). You head out with Higgins on your first assignment, after which he asks you to drive him to a seemingly unpleasant meeting.

Without spoiling too much, Higgins is killed by a large blast inside of the building, stirring up questions regarding your participation and resulting in your expulsion from the OCU. You’re then put back out onto the street, but are allowed to stay undercover. Fueled solely by his commitment to finding out what happened to Higgins, Marcus begins his journey on the streets of New York.

Following this onslaught of story progression, the game branches off into several paths, which helps alleviate what is a fairly linear experience up until that point. You can continue to follow the main story, or you can take on some side missions such as doing task for a friendly cabbie, making rounds for a beautiful seductress, or taking care of crimes in progress as they come in over the radio.

The major cases in the game are disappointing. The narrative if rife with clichés: betrayal, misdirection by informants, and your usual cop-n-criminal storyline. The game didn’t need to be inherently original or innovate the genre, because the core parts are all there for a good game. There’s a large assortment of weapons and death dealing feels fairly good, though admittedly standard. Still, if only there were some kind of mission variety somewhere in the game, it would be a wholly more enjoyable experience.

Here’s a typical mission when taking on the major cases. You get information from an informant regarding the whereabouts of some hotshot criminal/businessman doing some dirty work in the city’s crime syndicate. You head out to the indicated location, where a cutscene commences in which Marcus confronts said bad guy. The criminal freaks out and runs, but every criminal, whether it be a madam or an accountant, have a cadre of gun-toting men that provide back up and cover as he or she escapes. You then slog through the office building/construction site/opera house blowing away the rest of their posse until he or she either gives up and spills the beans during an interrogation, or hops into some large machine such as a stage dragon or crane and tries to kill you. That’s all; the game’s missions are one-trick ponies that get so repetitive that it pains you to see fairly good mechanics and concepts completely underutilized.

The side missions don’t offer much of a variety either, in fact they’re even worse to a degree. The crimes that come through on the radio at first seem pretty varied. There’s quite a variety and in the first hour or two driving through the city you only play through a few of them more than once. It’s actually quite enjoyable getting into some cop action and arresting a few unruly perps. Unfortunately, you’ll even eventually get tired of the woman’s voice on the dispatch, because of just how mind-numbingly imbecile you must be to fail these simplistic tasks. You simply have to run up and tackle the suspect, slam on the punch button and then arrest them. There are a couple of instances where the suspect is brandishing a weapon, but a couple of manually aimed shots to the shoulder usually do the trick. There, however, is one mission that comes out over the dispatch regarding city sweatshops that require you to use a bit of stealth to take out the first couple of guys, because there are about six total enemies in the building carrying semi-automatic weaponry. But once you figure out the pattern, it turns out to be cake just like the rest.

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