GTA meets Max Payne, that’s a pretty good way to describe this action game in my opinion. True Crime: Streets of LA will be coming to the big consoles (XBOX, PS2 and Gamecube) with maybe a PC port arriving a while after the console release. In the game you play a law enforcement guy called ‘Nick Kang’, he’s not a member of the regular police, but of the EOD (Elite Operations Division).

The game takes place in the city of Los Angeles (where E3 takes place), and according to the developers about 250 square miles of the city have been virtually recreated. The guy giving me the True Crime demonstration told me ‘If it’s in LA, it’s in the game’, guess we’ll just have to find out when the game is released. True Crime is an action game, offering you the ability to drive around in a car, have some shootouts in a warehouse somewhere, or kick some ass Kung Fu style.

Driving around in the streets of LA is definitely very much GTA like, but hey, that’s not so bad. In the virtual city there’s a lot of distance to cover, so there’s definitely some time to spend behind the wheel. The dispatcher lets you know if and where a crime is occurring, you can choose to go and intervene, or just keep enjoying the cool wind through your hair. You don’t have to do all assignments, but of course several will be mandatory to progress in the storyline. Can’t tell you much about that, apart from the fact that apparently our main character wants to find out who killed his father.

The game is played entirely from a third-person view perspective (apart from the possibility to go first-person when driving the car). This also makes you think of GTA, but when seeing the action scenes the name Max Payne pops up. The Kung Fu fighting is nicely done, and your character will have the ability to learn more moves as he gets more experience in the game. After seeing the fighting in action for a while, I got the impression a fight might take a moderate amount of time, especially when fighting multiple opponents at the same time. Let’s hope they don’t overdo it so things don’t get boring eh.

But no need to despair, there’s still plenty of shooting to be done. I still have my doubts of this part of the game. It looks quite a bit like Max Payne, but for some reason the whole control system seemed less intuitive to me. Means we’ll have to wait for the full game to find out all about it. All in all True Crime looks like a decent game, offering a nice mixture of genres. Due to the sheer size of the city, the game itself is said to be pretty huge, and should definitely take quite some time to complete. We can expect this action baby in the fall of 2003.