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Games this bad should have warning label

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 8
Date: November 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The only true crime here is the shoddy work done on this title. True Crimes: Streets of LA was like many Grand Theft Auto rip offs. Big city, plenty of running around to do. Except instead of working for the mob or whatever, you're actually a cop. It may not have been the best game, but it was a start. Some of the mechanics weren't bad. Some were actually fairly well done. I guess one could only expect a sequel. In hopes that True Crimes: New York City would be better, I seem to have had my hopes up.

You play as Marcus Reed, a gangster who has just become a cop so he can clean up the streets of New York. And as Marcus you'll take on the assignments given to you by the police department. They're all pretty straightforward. Each mission is divided into parts. Each part consists of you gunning down all the thugs, and finding the bad guy. Rinse and repeat. The missions, like Streets of LA, are very simple and don't really call for any real strategy at all. And the bad guys are as stereotypical as the main character himself.

The game is pretty simple, and should you only do the missions, you'll complete it in fairly short time. The same thing plagued the first True Crimes game, and I was hoping there would be an improvement here. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.

If you don't want to do the main mission though, there are alternatives. Much like GTA there are side missions you can do. You can street race, go off and stop other crimes, and you can frisk people for contraband, including drugs, obscene pictures, weapon parts, stolen license plates... and the list goes on. You can either turn these things into the station for Career Points, which help your rank.

There are five ranks in True Crimes 2, and they're all based on whether or not you're a good cop or a bad cop. Unfortunately, there's nothing special about the ranking system until you become an extremely bad cop, and that will overall lower your ranking.

Being a good cop simply means you've taken the proper precautions such as frisking your suspects, clipping them in cuffs and not killing anyone needlessly. Bad cops are obtained the exact opposite way. It's a lot easier to be a bad cop than a good cop, but it is still one of the points of True Crimes that sticks out as being plesant. You just won't notice until you're an extremely bad cop, or an extremely good cop.

The gameplay is simple. You shoot or strike down your enemies to death. You can lock on to them, but for some reason Marcus isn't always accurate in doing so. You can also pick up weapons your enemies drop but there isn't much variety in them, and in the end you'll most likely find yourself picking them up because you're low on ammo in one weapon, so you need more.

Melee combat isn't bad. You'll probably only do it because it looks cool, but it's almost suicide in some cases. You can pick up objects and lug them at your enemies and whatnot. You can also snap their necks if you're good enough, or throw them up against the wall. There's a lot of variety there. Hey, you can even do it to random pedestrians, but it isn't much fun (especially when they, for whatever reason, don't die).

The vehicles you drive around in are pretty realistic, based off of real cars, but you can't help but look at how messed up some of these mechanics are. A slight tap on another car will send it flying into traffic, without a doubt. It doesn't matter what the car is, it sends it out there! You'll also run into a moment or two of floating cars, and that's another of many bugs this game has.

There are more bugs than one can imagine. For example, you may just randomly fall through the ground into eternal darkness. You'll eventually die, but you'll wish you hadn't stepped on the crack when you do. Some of the scripted moments for whatever reason just stop, cars changing colors... the list goes on and on and on. And the XBOX version has a particular bug where the game totally freezes for good making it IMPOSSIBLE TO BEAT THE GAME!

Surely the graphics will save this game right? Naw, and if you think they do, something is seriously wrong with you. This isn't up to the standards of this generation at all. The character models are blockier than a cube of ice, and the framerate is terrible. Every five seconds or so the game will freeze and then resume. This very apparent when you're roaming the streets of New York. In the indoor areas it's less frequent, but you'll lose several boss fights because of that. The game freezes for that brief moment, but the action does not. Not only that, but sometimes the sound will cut out.

As far as the music goes, it really isn't too bad. You can rank your songs so that the ones you want to play actually play, and if there's a song you completely hate, you can rank it a zero and it'll never play.

The voice acting isn't bad. Christopher Walken lends his voice, but sometimes the celebrity voice actors feel like a waste. Especially with the poorly written script. Now, I can be a good sport about cusswords, but not when they're used as senselessly as this. They come as sounding like little middle school kids saying these words just to "be cool" rather than to be serious or tough.

Truthfully, I think this is a game that isn't worth getting. Way too many bugs, the game is short, the dialogue is bad, is there really any reason to want to get ths game? Even the graphics lack. This isn't worth your time. Even if you like True Crimes: Streets of LA this just isn't worth your time.

The Good:
+The sound, for what it's worth, isn't bad.

The Bad:
-Choppy graphics
-Terrible framerate
-Bad dialogue
-Way too stereotypical
-Way too many bugs to enjoy

Just avoid it. Not worth your time.

Unacceptable GTA Clone

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: April 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

True Crime New York City is the sequel to True Crime L.A. Though you are now playing as a former gang member named, Marcus instead of Kang. Marcus was framed and betrayed by his own gang boss, so from the beginning of the game you will start blasting away in a bitter state of revenge. Marcus then makes a new lead in life by becoming a cop with the help of his father's friend. Five years later, Marcus is being offered the undercover detective position and sets out to fight crime in the city of New York. First let me comment, on the good points of the game: The shooting, driving and martial arts system in the gameplay have been improved over its predecessor. In the shooting aspect, you can now lock on to targets and blast away. The weaponry has improved and are more fierce, feeling a bit like Max Payne. You can also do presiscion shots again but it feels better. The driving vehicles also improved, feeling tighter and you can even drift on corners.

The good points however, are dragged down by sloppy programming that left the game unfinished and full of strange glitches, which are not acceptable! My in-game mini radar showed a bad guy as a red dot and I went searching endless for the bad guy and could never find it even though I was right on the dot. Then I made my game character look up and the bad guy was FLOATING in mid-air! The in-game police characters often chased after ghost criminals yelling "stop right there" and then took off running!
Sometimes when I crashed my cars with other vehicles, their body would sink half-way into the ground! The sound effects and character speeches would cut off abruptly, especially on the streets with pedestrians. Shooting bad guys in the head is not always a kill, but I shot someone in the leg three times and they died! The graphics are cheap and the frame-rate is full of lag! I don't care how wonderful a game concept is. If the gameplay is so buggy as to hinder its enjoyment, then it is junk! Game developers should not release buggy games like this and sell them to the public as a finished product, this simply is unacceptable! Skip this and save your money; you've been warned.

Pros:
+minor improvements
+arresting people is fun

Cons:
-cheap looking graphics
-floating bugs
-collision detection problems
-sound issues
-terrible frame-rate
-control issues
-improvements ruined by glitches

Spare yourself the misery!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: June 28, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I am not the kind of guy who complains or demands a lot about games and I have always been able to overlook minor glitches as long as the game is fun and keeps me entertained, HOWEVER I must say that I have NEVER EVER had such a terrible experience like I did with this game. In the beginning I was loving the game, great missions and I could literally play it for hours, but then the nightmare started. There is a mission that you have to complete called "Shadow Tong" where you have to push a character off a crate, I found out at least in my case that it is just impossible. After hours and hours of trying to do it and reading walkthroughs that could help me figure out what I was doing wrong, I realized that it wasn't even my fault!!!!!!! It is a glitch that apparently comes only for the XBOX version and tons of people were having the same problem. The result was my total and utter dissapointment, after all, what is the point of starting a game you cannot finish????!!!! I felt ripped off and extremely upset and I decided to warn everybody about this because it is unacceptable. Since then the game is stored in my closet getting dusty, reminding me the HUGE MISTAKE I did throwing my good earned money in the garbage. There are hundreds of great games you could buy, think of the choices and spare yourself the misery of getting this one. So please just research a little bit so you know what I'm talking about and if you do decide to ignore what I have stated here, well don't say I didn't warn you.

P.S. The game freezes ALL the time as well so be prepared for that too if you buy it.

Pretty Much WORTHLESS..

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 9
Date: November 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

True Crime New York....I actually just rented it tonight, played it for 30 minutes, and repeatedly said the phrase "this is gay". For everyone that found "streets of L.A." to be a pretty decent experience probably will not like this crap. From the get-go, it feels solid and very intense, possibly worth the time. My mind soon changed when I got into the game. I know it's New York and traffic jams are common, BUT COME ON!! You can barely run without smacking against a friggin car!! I mean I realize 'L.A.' had it's fair share of bugs to make it not great, but this is just lame. I am by no means a Grand Theft Auto fan at all, but they completely stole the concept from San Andreas and threw a new name onto it. that's all I have to say. Depending on your preferences it may be worth a rent, but i strongly urge you to not spend your cash on this pile.

True Crime?......More Like False

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: February 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I liked the first True Crime a lot so when they announced this game I had high expectations for it. I got it and started to play it and I loved it, I was like YEAH! another True Crime, but then after the first 5 minutes if gameplay it turned into crap. It was kind of like the creators put all there effort into the first five minutes of the game then they were just like "alright lets finish this already." The first five minutes of gameplay are non-stop actionu are in a warehouse killing all these gang members for revenge or something with these two sick Uzi's, BUT THEN a cut-scene happens and all of a sudden alakazam......its crap. After the cutscene you are a cop and it is two years or something into the future and you and your partner are set to go on a mission. You drive there and your partner walks in alone and the whole place explodes. Your cop expectations go down and now oyu must work your way up doing dirty work. Thats basically the whole game, doing dirty work and its not fun at all.

Probably the most fun out of the game is just running around on foot, because the driving is horrible, and arresting random people and showing them your badge and shooting your gun in the air. Everything else sucks. The story-line missions are so boring and pointless. All you do in the story missions are go to this random guy and get told about this bad guy who needs to be in jail but its your job to figure out where he is. So the random guy gives you a list of poeple who might know something about the wanted bad guy. So you go to a warehouse and kill everyone in it and make the person tell you something about the wanted bad guy and then you go to another warehouse and do the same thing about three or four times till you have found enough info on the guy to take him out. Then once you have got that guy the random guy gives you another guy you need to find info about. And thats over and over till the story missions are done, sounds boring...right? Well it is! There are side missions but they suck and are also boring. Like doing missions for your father or taxi missions and racing missions.

The environment is horrible, now i know New York city is awesome and what not, but NYC sucks in a game, like really sucks. First of all the place is so freakin huge that if oyu want to do a mission you have to drive for like five minutes just to get to the person who tells you the mission. Then you have to drive to where the actual mission takes place which is another five minutes. This will keep you from doing the other missions because you will be like....eh i dont want to drive all the way there lets just do this misssion. The car crashing is also horrible. When you crash you most likely do a 180 degree turn, which gets really annoying when you are in a cop chase. Also the place is just boring, its the same looking buildings over and over again and its like never day and ther is always garbage flying across the screen, its like a dump.

OVerall the whole story-line sucks. Basically because there is no specific storyline. The game jst feels like someone regular, normal life, the normal life of a cop. The sound sucks too, especially the cars. When you crash it is the most irritating noise and the cutscene volume is so low while the gameplay volume is super high. So you will turn up the volume while in a cutscene and forget to turn it lower for gameplay and your ears will blow out from the noise. The controls are also bad. Since its like just based on a normal life of a cop you are able to do all the normal things making you use all buttons on the controler. I mean the back button shoot in the air, now when is the back button ever used except for menus. The fighting stile is cool but it kind of gets confusing with all the buttons you have to press.

You are able to do all the same things as the first like badge showing and arresting and fighting moves and shooting in the air. Really the most fun i have in the game is driving at full speed in a car and when someone does that stupid thing, like in all games, where they change lanes and get infront of you to make you crash; so i slam into them from the back and then make them get out of the car and arrest them, because in all other games you can't do anything about it, like GTA.

Overall this game is bad and not what it could have been or should have been. I would not recommend this game to anyone, its just so bad. IF you True Crime fans want to try it be my guest, but you will be surely disappointed. All you other people if you want to rent it just for the first five minutes of the game go ahead. This game is M for Mature: Blood and gore, intense violence, strong language, strong sexual content, use of drugs.

Glitch after Glitch after Glitch...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: December 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game, while trying to improve on the original leaves a lot to be desired. I have experienced a lot of glitches and problems with this game. First, I had to take the first game back and exchange it for a different copy because when I tried it on two different systems and it kept freezing up in the first part of the game, it wouldn't be so bad but you start back at the end of the last mission you had just saved and if you have arrested a lot of people and spent a lot of time running around doing a lot of extra stuff you lose all that progress.
Second problem is, while in a mission I was arresting someone after knocking them out and rolling them over, the screen suddenly flipped and put me under the floor and I fell to my death with nothing I could do about it.
Third problem, I was driving up to the pier for a mission, jumped out of my car and the whole area turned to water, my car was covered and I drowned while I was getting ready to walk up to the door.
Fourth problem, this one is pretty minor, just an aggravation, while driving the license plate that you see when saving the game, will flash up on the screen just for a split second.
I like playing the game but I will not only complete the main mission and quit playing it because I don't like playing games that waste my time with all the glitches. I think the creators need to be a little more careful with this kind of problem with these games because it will end up costing them in the long run.
If you want a game that is free of these kinds of glitches I would recommend 50 Cent: Bullet Proof. Save your money on this one while it's fun to play it's a glitch ridden piece of crap.

Eh, not bad, but it's not "True Crime" anymore

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: December 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Apparently, the fact that this game bears a striking resemblance to GTA in more ways than one has been addressed more than enough, so I won't go there... directly.
I will, however, comment that while this game is fairly entertaining, it lacks the essential nuances that made the first True Crime a unique title capable of holding its own next to the GTAs.
In the first TC, you HAD to explore the city in order to find the places to upgrade your character, and those upgrades had to be EARNED through usage of the skills. Also, the L.A. cityscape had a lot more variation- from residential areas to commercial districts, and the freeway system was awesome.
In TC:NYC, you're bottle-fed upgrade locations; they're clearly marked from the get-go, so there's really no need to explore the city. Plus, the upgrades are PURCHASED, not earned, with money that is very easily acquired. Essentially, you walk into a dojo, pay a few bucks, and congrats, you know karate instantaneously.
The RPG sense of upgrading and building your character that made the first TC fresh and new is all but gone from this title. It'll take you about an hour or two to achieve the maximum cop ranking, and that only unlocks a few cars and weapons which can just as easily be purchased from one of the game's dozens of vendors.
You can take a cab or the subway anywhere you want to go, including active crime scenes and that's just dumb. Also, seeing as the cab rides are dirt cheap, it almost makes no sense to DRIVE anywhere, especially when the most realistically rendered thing in the whole game is New York's infamous bumper-to-bumper gridlock! Also, and maybe I was wrong to expect anything different- perhaps NYC really looks like this- but I honestly got bored with the same drab surroundings block, after block, after block after... you get the point. I started taking cabs everwhere just because the tedium of driving and wrecking at every intersection caused a malignant tumor to form in my brain.
Another point is the car mechanics. Almost every vehicle you drive feels too big and weighty. Perhaps it was the close feel of the narrow streets, but even the sports coups felt like school buses. Ever tried a jacknife turn on a two-lane, one-way street during rush-hour traffic? It sucks both in real life and in this game. And forget about driving backwards; even if you've got a car that can haul @$$ going forward, our hero Marcus Reed backs up like my grandmother.
Then they added the clothes changes and hair-styles which, to me, just screamed "we wish we were GTA!" Honestly, neither has any bearing whatsoever on the game, your environment or the people around you.
All in all, that game doesn't make for a bad GTA knock-off, but it does lack in the sequal department. Ever since the first TC, I've anticipated this sequal. I waited two years and all I got was this crummy T-shirt.

Not That Bad

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: October 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

People are really ripping into this game, but I actually really like it. There are definitely some glitches but that tends to happen in a huge open world game like this one. Even GTA is not completely glitch-free. It does feel like they released the game too soon, without proper testing, but it is still fun. The learning curve is a little steeper than with GTA but once you get it figured out, there is an enjoyable game here. It's kinda cool to play the good guy for a change, but you can always go rogue if you want...anyway if you like GTA and you have some patience to learn the control scheme, this is a good game at a bargain price. You can definitely spend many hours wandering around New York busting perps; crimes happen all around you in real time - not like GTA where you have to go 'get a mission' in order to make anything interesting happen. For this reason alone, the game world feels more alive and exciting. I say buy it.

New York C-C-C-C-C-C-beeeeeeeeeep-CRASH!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 20, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I'll start by saying that True Crime NYC is the first console game that I can remember since the Sega Master System days that actually crashed my console. New game disc, 2005 model Xbox with no read errors or other problems; this is simply a horribly broken piece of software.

What is so sad about TCNYC is the clear attempt to make a great game. The programmers were trying to do something big here, what with the interesting storyline, the depth of the fighting engine, detailed building interiors, on and on. But they failed spectacularly at almost every attempt.

To the first major failure: an apparent lack of understanding of how to program software within the limitations of the hardware. The game simply tries to render far too much during driving for even the reasonably powerful Xbox. Framerates sieze up every block or two, and this led to my first complete system crash within ten minutes of play. Disturbing. I can only imagine how unplayable this is on the less powerful PS2. The driving control scheme relies on "special move" buttons to perform stunts; a pretty good indicator that the programmers had no idea how to build a working car physics engine. The awful control scheme doesnt even include analogue gas/brake functions, which would have been perfectly fine on the trigger buttons (GTA 2 did this with the DREAMCAST controller almost ten years ago). Rolling through NYC in a jet-black unmarked 4.6 Crown Vic Interceptor should feel cool, but it just feels crummy.

The on foot engine is acutally an improvement over GTA's, at least until running or fighting. While the fight sequences could have been a saving grace, the ridiculously complicated Street Fighter-style button combos make it miserable. Each special move button results in a pre-rendered animation sequence that feels clumsy and is just as likely to leave your face in the fist of your enemy as have the desired consequence. A simplified scheme with fewer "special" moves and improved response time could have made this the nicest fighting engine in any open-world game to date. But it isn't.

The city itelf, while detailed and often well-lit at night, just doesn't have the character of Liberty City. Perhaps due to the lack of any verticality in the landscape (no bridges, hills, or even peaks and valleys in roadways), the city feels dull and lifeless after a few hours of driving. And strange glitches in environment lighting (car lights flicker on and off) and collision detection evaporate any sense of realism. Not to mention awful behavior programming for pedestrians which turns every NYC resident into a Tourette's victim.

The story is initially interesting, although the foul language used as "dialogue" crosses the line from shocking to just plain bad writing. Unfortunately a horrific glitch in the volume balance means you wont hear 90% of the game's cutscenes. There must have been some evil, angry, vindictive person in charge of testing this game. You just can't screw up this bad accidentally.

The one element that really stood out as a positive was the use of NYC's precincts as controllable strategic elements of the overall map. By apprehending criminals (who commit a wide variety of rather creative crimes) in a precinct, you can gradually clean it up and gain respect and rank within your squad. While it's not much more than a nonessential side mission, I found it gave me a sense of control and accomplishment that the paint-by-numbers story mode lacked.

Unfortunately, a few unique concepts arent enough to save TCNYC from its abominable technical problems. Because the developers tried to do so much and occasionally succeeded, I can't say it's a completely bad game...but due to all the glitches it's certainly a failure.

Just Like GTA is that bad?

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: November 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

So many of the game reviews are picky. One of the biggest complaints about this game has been that it is the same old thing. Just like Grand Theft Auto. WHen was being like one of what is considered one of the best games ever been a bad thing? That said, if you don't like violence or profanity, avoid this game at all costs. It has both in spades. The game is very similar to the whole GTA vibe. Lots of free roaming action, lots of violence to innocent people, lots of what people loved from GTA. YOu can get more details from other reviews. The truth is if you are a churchgoer, avoid this game, it will do nothing to improve your spirituality. If you love GTA you love this game.

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