True Crime: New York City

True Crime: New York City had the potential to break through and be something exciting...but once again it's another GTA clone that just doesn't understand why GTA is so beloved.

We love the ambition in this take on the Big Apple, but sometimes the inexpert mechanics just can't be ignored.

No matter what you do, things get very repetitive. I mean, how many counterfeiters can there really be in New York?

GTA clones are a dime a dozen these days, but Luxoflux's True Crime franchise has stepped up to the mark with an engaging plot, and fun-filled free-flowing action.

There's plenty here, but while it is good quality, it's all familiar stuff, and the emphasis on quantity rather than variety gets tiresome. [Apr 2006, p.86]

A note to aspiring developers: DO NOT give players the freedom to do what they want if you’re going to punish them for it later!

A marked improvement over Streets of L.A. Overall it's more refined and the storyline is more relevant to the gameplay.

Tries to bring the drama of the street home to you, but comes away with a vanilla game instead, replete with bugs, glitches and other issues.

Sadly, Activision’s second installment in the True Crime series is a big disappointment that begins with the storyline and ends with almost everything else.

True Crime: New York City just doesn’t cut the mustard. There are a lot of good basic concepts and ideas that unfortunately lost their way in the development process.

Navigating your vehicles through the city streets feels good, but there is a sense of unbalance in the physics. You can drive at breakneck speeds, but if you hit a car stopped at a red light or a parked car, the feedback is like hitting a brick wall.

If framerate problems doesn't annoy you, then the stupidity of the A.I. may force you to say, "that sh*t is wow, bananas." Enemies are stricken by stupidity, as they'll simply stand there and allow you shoot the living daylights out of them.

My advice: wait for the PC version, where you will have a fighting chance of playing the game with a better framerate and refined controls (and hopefully Activision will issue patches to cover its holes).

A menagerie of all the elements of bad game design. It takes many more steps backwards than it does forwards, and awkward (even game-stopping) bugs will frustrate you if the embedded elements don't.

On paper, it's got the potential to be more than a match for "San Andreas"; in practice, it's nowhere near it.

This game is junk, period. Please, spare yourself the agony and stay far away from this title... enjoy a second play through of Vice City or San Andreas instead. The sheer number of fun-ruining bugs in this game is the stuff smashed controllers are made of, so don’t even bring yourself down to the level the developers take you for when they decided to release this thing.

Releasing this game in its current state – now that’s a true crime.

So many corners were cut and details rushed that whatever good content is there is overshadowed by the mistakes.

Basically, it's a game with loads of potential, but awful physics and endless technical glitches are the real crime here.

Complete with more bugs than month-old flypaper sitting outside a slaughterhouse, True Crime: New York City is utterly mediocre.

It hopelessly mires itself in technical problems: frame rates drop and stutter precipitously and unpredictably; characters move through, and get stuck in, solid objects; there's often tangible lag between moving the joystick and seeing the result; collision detection and vehicle physics are spotty at best; and heck, the game even freezes entirely on occasion.

Like this year's Philadelphia Eagles, this game is the quintessential example of a franchise taking a step in the wrong direction. Our advice: Run away.

Unless you're dying to drive around in a reasonably well-crafted digital version of New York at 20 frames a second, there's just no reason to force yourself through this storyline. Too many things are broken from the outset, and the rest aren't any fun.

While playable, True Crime: New York City really isn't worth buying, with clipping bugs and a bad story line and the game being somewhat too easy the game just isn't worth it.

Maybe it's because I just don't like the main character, maybe it's because the story is dafter than my opening paragraph, maybe it's because it's a third rate GTA wannabe. In any case, this one should be avoided unless you really liked the first one, although this is actually a step back from the original.

A step backwards even from its mediocre predecessor. With the multitude of ugly bugs the game feels unfinished, and the driving model is just plain awful. [Jan 2006]