I think that it's surprising that there haven't been more Grand Theft Auto III clones, I thought it was and is a remarkable game that (love it or hate it) took the world by storm and had everyone who didn't own a PS2 looking jealously at the release schedules and the new game sections of magazines and websites hoping for something similar, or preferably a GTA3 beater to come along - and it did.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was brilliant - it took the highly adaptable GTA3 game engine and stretched it to and sometimes beyond its limits, allowing you to run, drive cars, ride motorbikes and fly helicopters all over an expansive fictional city with the sort of freedom that few other games ever did (it also had a backbone of an engaging storyline voice-acted by a selection of well-known Hollywood actors and an 80s radio soundtrack complete with DJs that was simply brilliant… Anyway - released some time ago in the US, I've read several reviews of this game, and with lots of scores of 9/10 I had real hopes for True Crime: Streets of LA, but believe me, I have no idea whatsoever what game they were playing…

TC:SoLA is the anti-GTA. In a change of pace from cool, wisecracking, disaster-prone Italian-American bad guy (Tommy Vercetti) you play sarcastic and mostly unfunny Nick Kang, second-generation Chinese LA Cop tracking down the big nobs of the Chinese and Russian mobs under the auspices of the EOD (Elite Operations Department). Being a Cop is unlikely to be as much fun as being a bad guy, but nicely the game gives you the 'freedom' to get things wrong from time to time and you have a Yin~Yang good Cop/bad Cop tally that keeps score of how many innocents you've killed, probably by either running them down or shooting them by accident whilst chasing the excessive bad guys that have infested Luxoflux's 240 square miles of virtual Los Angeles.

   

As your Mum probably tells you, first impressions are important and this game fails to impress right from the start, with a glitchy, low resolution & detail sequence that looks more like a Playstation game intro than an Xbox game - it's poor even allowing for TC:SoLA'S cross format roots. The City is undeniably impressive in size, but the game's physics engine is simplistic and unconvincing compared to GTA's; vehicles mostly look great with high levels of detail, extensive damage modelling and shiny paintwork, but the handling never convinces you that you're really driving and some of the physics are bizarre.

GTA3's on-foot sections allowed you to explore almost every nook and cranny of the cities, but the fighting and shooting was poorly implemented - this game tries to right the wrongs but ends up simply creating a whole new set of glitches and annoyances with thousands of buildings that are no more than low detail scenery, poor camera angles, overcomplicated and unresponsive controls and a hand to hand combat mode that borders on the amusing - it's that bad with it's terrible collision detections and annoying boss characters with their unblockable attacks. Here's a brief(ish) description of how badly this game plays: Nick might be cruising the streets when he gets a call from the dispatcher - a car theft, a mugging, street racers - it could be anything and so you respond by heading towards the red dot on the GTA-style map. So you chase down the "perp" (in probably TC:SoLA's finest moment you can even shoot out the tyres of moving vehicles whilst driving along thanks to a brief bullet time interlude) and you stop the car. Out hops a woman in a business suit - and stupidly she'll come at you, punching and kicking like Jackie Chan, and unless you shoot her things end up in a street brawl and will put up as good a fight as an armed bank robber or even the cannibal guy who seems to keep re-escaping time and time again. Whilst "arresting" anyone on the street (you can "pat down" anyone and search them, or show you badge or fire a warning shot to encourage a perp to give surrender) you might also get repeatedly run over by the unbelievably stupid traffic - they simply don't seem to know (or care) that you're there, and make no attempt to avoid you. Once the crazy woman is beaten to a pulp (you can use button combos to do special martial arts moves) you can cuff her and you get a good cop point for her - lose patience and draw your gun and shoot her fatally and you get a bad cop minus point - and it's this good cop/bad cop idea that could have saved the game. It could have meant a genuine branching storyline and mission structure (you can go back and replay any episode of the game at any time), but some depend on you having a good cop status, and sometimes it's just too much work to regain that level of goodness - and as many of the deaths that get you bad cop status are due to difficult weapon aiming (you can get a non-fatal immobilising shot but they're rather difficult when you're being shot), twitchy steering, stupid crash physics and dumb AI then is it even fair? We've had perps disappear through barriers and stand there fighting you from a position in from which they can't escape and you can't hit them, cars appear right behind Nick and run him over, bizarre crashes that sent the car shooting fifty feet into the air, as well as many other minor problems like confused cameras and auto aiming that constantly misses.

So you drive around like GTA, only in a bigger city with prettier cars and civilian character models, only it doesn't feel as good or play as well - apart from strange physics frame rate problems and pop-up spoil the look of the driving sections badly. The time of day and the weather changes, but the stop-go structure of the game and frequent loading disjoints any feeling of continuity. You explore buildings but you can only enter a few highlighted ones (and there are loads of stairs and passageways that you can't actually walk up). You get clever on-street combat/arrest/aim weapon modes that sound good when you read the manual but even with hours of practice end up being so fiddly, complicated and downright broken-feeling that they just piss you off. Indoor levels see you enter stealth/shooting or combat modes (these load separately, like they're a completely different game) with upgradeable attack moves, terrible aiming and camera work that doesn't really stand close inspection.

GTA3/Vice City's radio stations and soundtracks were brilliant; TC:SoLA's soundtrack may be authentic and atmospheric LA West Coast Hip Hop soundtrack hip hop rap crap and all that it entails (that includes 50 original songs from Snoop Dogg, Westside Connection, Warren G., Coolio etc. etc.) , but after listening to it for half an hour I wanted to kill people - thank God you can use your own soundtracks - PS2 and Gamecube owners of course aren't so lucky.

   

Reading back through this review it sounds like an advert for GTA3/Vice City - and brilliant but indisputably flawed as those games were they gave you a wonderful toy box full of vehicles and guns, and a place you wanted to explore - TC:SoLA's huge (and I mean HUGE) play area is a bland, impersonal backdrop to a heavily scripted game. Even the voice acting talents of Christopher Walken, Gary Oldman, Michael Madsen, Russell Wong, Michelle Rodriguez, Ron Perlman, CCH Pounder and that fantastic actor Snoop Dogg can't save the hackneyed storyline and cut scenes from anything other than mediocre padding that you'll want to skip.

Potentially one of the games of the year, TC:SoLA clearly needed more development time to sort out the dialogue, car handling and physics, bugs, glitches and poor controls - or maybe just a QA team that were prepared to tell the coding team what was wrong with it. Nick can improve his abilities and gather a nice collection of cars during the game, but I doubt many gamers will bother with Xbox GTA just around the corner. Direct comparisons aren't always a good idea, but this game so clearly wants to be GTA and tried hard to improve the genre, but it just doesn't work. Truly, the only Crime committed here was releasing a game with such promise in this unfinished state - as with the disappointment that was Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, heads should roll.