True Crime New York City Xbox One

[Jude Petkus]

MarcusReed is a gangster turned cop who is out to clean the streets of New York. Marcus joins the Organized Crime Division of the NYPD with the intent to rid the city of crime and violence. Hoping to make a name for himself after his mentor is shot down, Marcus goes after the top crime syndicates of the city.

Besides having to do this, Marcus is a street-level cop. He is responsible for anything from stopping street fights to stopping gang wars to defusing bombs! Not only this, he can frisk people on the street for contraband, can do trunk searches on cars, as well as issue tickets to speeders.

But if Marcus is gonna do all those things, he's gonna do it his way. Need some cash? Marcus isn't opposed to a bit of extortion from the local pharmacy. Need some way to stabilize your career after that rampage last week? Plant some evidence on a guy and bring him in. No one will know. Pistols not cutting it for you? The gun stores sell police officers anything, from M4s to flamethrowers to RPGs.

With the city of New York at your fingertips, and nearly every building accessible to you, how will you rule? Will you be a shining beacon of morals, or a shady figure in the underworld of NY. The choice is up to you.

In the game you do missions such as shooting drug dealers collecting evidence interrogating main leaders or fist to fist fighting goons in between missions Marcus can bust random crimes like Domestic Disturbances, Hold Ups, bomb threats, or hostage situations doing such missions has rewards such as getting Promotions, or cleaning up a precinct of New York and Eventually the entire city getting promotions allows you access to better cars, better guns, and higher pay checks with which you can buy food for health and learn fighting moves and techniques such as Karate, Tae Kwon Doe, and Tai Boxing.

Just like in Streets Of LA you can walk the line of good/bad cops but in this installment more in depth like the ability to extort clerks and planting evidence on civilians or shooting an unarmed perp and you can except bribes from criminals while being a good cop requires you to refuse such temptations.

The Good

Personally, my favorite thing in the game is something I sorely wished for when I played the game Freelancer. One thing you have to do to complete the game 100% is clean up street crime. The game starts with seemingly random precincts of New York having low, medium, or high crime (though there was probably some reason to that, because notoriously high crime areas, like Harlem, started as a high crime), and if you ignore crime, eventually all precincts not fully cleaned up will become high crime. But if you solve crimes in a precinct, you can clean it up completely. More stores open, the crime rate in that precinct no longer increases, and I think you become less likely to be called to crimes in that area. That ability to make a real difference in the game world beyond the main storyline was what in my opinion set it apart from many other games.

In this game, you have the ability to customize your appearance, for a price. So, if you don't like the silly looking dreadlocks Marcus starts out with (I didn't), you can change his haircut (but not his facial hair). You can also purchase new clothes, to suit what look you like best. Your clothes don't really have any influence on the missions (blow up taxis dressed as a pimp, a tourist, or in casual clothes, the game doesn't care, and neither do the NPCs), but one cool thing is your appearance transfers over to the cinematics. It's a cool touch, having how your character looks in the game carry over to the cinematics. Granted, the cinematics are still set in stone, and you'll never hear anyone in the cinematics tell you how ridiculous you look as a half-naked cowboy, but it is funny to see them have the same conversation in the same tone regardless of whether you're wearing jeans and a t-shirt or pimp clothes.

This game also has a concept of time, with day and night, weather, and it seems even a slight semblance of seasons. Certain stores and nightclubs are only open at certain times, and lights in buildings go on and off depending on the time of day. You'll never see snow on the ground past the first mission, but sometimes you may see snow in the air in the game. However, the use of time coupled with the rushed nature of the game made it an interesting feature, but also somewhat of a Pandora's Box.

Coming close second was the bugs. One reviewer one said the game contained more bugs than a 5th story flat, which is certainly true unless there's a whole colony of ants living there. There's dozens of bugs, if not 100, then a matching number of things in the game that might not be considered technically "bugs", but certainly should have been fixed. I was thinking of making a whole list, but found there are plenty of full lists on other websites, and this is just a review. But there are a few things that are major enough to be worth mentioning here.

The biggest error is that at random times while you're driving (it seems to be around the time the weather changes), the graphics will temporarily go screwy. It's hard to describe; the best I can do is saying the last image before the bug starts overlays all images afterward. Plus your radar blanks out, pausing just shows a black screen, and the bug continues even if you get out of the car, and even if you go indoors. Then, just as unexpectedly as it starts, it stops.

There are a number of changes in the German version:* All blood and gore effects were removed.* During interrogations, players can't use a gun to threaten the person begin questioned. Instead, an option to persuade them with reason was included.* The option to brake the neck of an unsuspecting enemy from behind was removed.* Flame throwers and molotov cocktails were removed.

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