So i managed to gain access to one of my 4 old HDDs. Luckily the one i got into was where i stored much of my RFGen/Hardcore Gaming(who sadly went offline. The URL is in use again but it is not the site i once loved) I managed to recover this review as well as a around 1k scans(all of which i believe i uploaded ~5 years ago :-/) and other RFGen related materials.
I started this review (+/-)5 years ago. It is mostly completed and i have edited it ever so slightly (capitalized the I's, fixed some typos, added Max Payne comparison, etc) from the condition i recently recovered it in. I was originally going to finish it up right away since i knew it was incomplete but i realized i remember very little about the game off hand and would have to either play it for a couple minutes or look at some game play footage to put myself back through the lackluster and mostly forgettable experience that was this game.
So onto the review. Feel free to be critical of this as i do intend to finish it and submit it to the DB.... also i hope all the HTML works.
Well what do we have here? Is this a GTA/Max Payne clone/hybrid?
Well at first glance it may seem so. But because it is a free roaming game it will automatically be compared to that series, which in my opinion is much better.
Oh yes and before I begin right from the start I have to be honest. The back of the box only told you a half truth. While you never repeat the same mission twice you will be doing one of these things every mission; fighting a handful of enemies, shooting dozens of enemies, stealth fighting enemies or "maintaining a safe distance".
True Crime: Streets of L.A. is a very mediocre game. It seemed like rather than picking one genre and making it good they tried to incorporate 3 of them into a decent title.
The fighting is OK, but glitchy. Sometimes you will hit an enemy and knock them through a wall or impassable object and have to try and attack them through said wall and hope they are knocked back onto the side you are on. There were also at least two instances where the person I was fighting dissapeared completely only to reappear a second or two later.
There isn't much to do with the attacking anyways. There isn't a very complex move set so it is pretty much you continuosly hitting A, X and Y and running to you opponant. You can use B to grapple in a fight but since it takes so long 98% of the time you will get attacked, 1.5% of the time of the time you end up getting it reversed or headbutted, etc and .5% of the time you will actually "successfully" grapple someone
The shooting was acceptable though. The aiming system is pretty weak but it does improve over time... or maybe you just get use to it over time...). There is a decent array of weaponry and it is always fun to dual wield AK-47's, sawed-off and double barrel shotguns. There are a few other guns, Magnums and I believe Mac10s, but those are really the only ones worth mentioning and they are the ones you will encounter for the most part.
The driving in the game can be glitchy with the vehicles you jack from citizens. Sometimes they will not accelerate properly or will decelerate slightly for no reason or worst of all will just move very very slowly. One of the worst parts is the camera will not adjust it's angle to accommodate for vehicle size. So if you want to steal a bus to wreak havoc or take it off some sweet jumps don't bother. You won't be seeing much of what your actually doing.
There is some stealth. Nothing much to comment on. Walk around really slow. Wait for a guy to turn around, knock him out or break his neck. You have a tranq gun with 3 rounds for those tricky situations. But it has no auto aim and no reticule, pretty much get them in the center of the screen and shoot and you should hit your mark though.
One of the more original parts of this game is the good cop bad cop mechanic. But even this has already been used more effectively in games(Fable). Kill a citizen you get 1 bad point. Kill a perp you get a bad point. Snap a dudes neck on a stealth mission you get a bad point. Beat the crap out of a perp and cuff him you get a good point. Knock out a dude in a stealth mission you get a good point. It is much easier(and more fun) to get bad points than it is to get good points. But unfortunately if you are not a good cop you will run into the problem of not being able to progress till you get yourself out of the negative.
A couple final jabs at this game:
Story line is pretty weak. The game probably would have been better if you just were assigned a mission and did it. They made the cutscenes unnecessarily long considering the story is so short.
SPOILER!The game COMPLETELY goes over the deep end. You go from being a normal LA cop to killing zombies and an ancient Chinese dragon. It just is thrown at you out from nowhere(!) and if memory serves it happened near the end of the game./SPOILER!
RF Generation Review Score
65%(Also why do i have insufficient privileges to post spoilers in the blogs?)
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This games wasn't so bad as far as post-GTA3 clones are. The driving was weak, the story was weak, the best thing was the aiming system. I'd say the best fun I had was shaking down random people on the street.
Also if you go to the game end with a "positive alignment" (can't remember what it was called) you ended up with one trippy boss fight (considering how serious the game was).
It was a good distraction at the time, but it doesn't hold up today.
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This was one of the few GCN games I played all the time before I started collecting. Since I had not played a 3D GTA before this, I could not compare them, and I honestly thought this was a good game. Sure, there were a lot of glitches, and the story wasn't awesome, but it was fun to play.
My favorite part was crashing cars in it, I'd get a Lamborghini-like car and just drive down the sidewalks killing as many people as I could, or finding ramps to go off and seeing how bad I could get it to glitch.
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@NES_Rules:In my opinion, breaking finding ways to "break" the game (glitching) is the best kind of fun in these GTA and GTA knockoffs. Oh, and listening to the radio.
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