Customer Reviews

True Crime: New York City

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

True Crime: NYC is a great game, with tons of stuff to do and many elements that breathe life into the city. The storyline is actually only a minor fraction of the game, the real fun comes from driving around the city, doing the street crimes and discovering all the different stores around the city. There are car shops, music stores, dojos, and gun shops spread around the city that offer different cars, songs, fighting styles, weapons and other clothing.
Don't like driving around? Take a cab or ride the subway. Solve the crimes throughout the city and watch how the buildings and trees reflect the changes. You can kill, arrest, stun, frisk, interrogate or extort people, using different weapons and skills you acquire throughout the game.
Unlike GTA, in this game the whole city is actually filled with life.
Many people rented this game for a day and complain that it's just another GTA. I think that's because they did not spend the time to discover all the different things and activities in the city.
The graphics are great too. The city is full of details. There is a day/night cycle, weather effects, reflections on the ground and even litter flying around. All sorts of different cars and a bunch of street objects which are all breakable.

What's not to like?

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.

This game is better than GTA:SA by a little bit!Unlike the 1st True crime, you can swim and you can go into stores like gun shopes, banks, offices, clubs, the police department and more! Also you can search trunks. You can even eat!!! You can buy cars from dealerships and buy guns from gunshops. And better street crimes are available. You can take subways and taxis around the city too. And you can ride motorcycles too!!!!!!!!!!!! You can also change and buy clothes! Overall this game is way better then TC: Streets of LA and is almost better than the whole GTA series!If you love True crime and enjoy playing GTA, buy this game immediatly.

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.

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.

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.

its fun to just turn this game on and fool around in the environment. the city looks\feels JUST like being in New York (especially Harlem) and it is HUGE. frisk people for illegal contriband, drive around listening to music or stop in the MANY restaurants and get something to eat to restore health. i myself love the shooting scheme where when you push down the right joystick, things slow down so you can target better. excellent shooting effects as well. best game to come out yet...

THE ONLY TRUE PROBLEM THAT I HAVE WITH THIS GAME IS THAT CARS APPEAR INFRONT OF YOU WHEN YOU LOOK TO THE SIDE!! i like to drive around and just gaze at the perfect automobile i am in from every angle...only to switch back to the normal angle to find myself crashing into a car that WAS NOT THERE before. i did a test to see if the cars did infact APPEAR out of nowhere...i switched the view to the side for a split second and switched it back...and low and behold..a car that was not there had appeared out of nowhere in front of me while i was driving. when your trying to keep your car looking nice...and cars appear out of nowhere and make you crash and ruin it...it sucks alil bit :|

if you can get past this small problem, youll enjoy this game alot. i played it more than i did GTA:SA...

iLL .

This is a very fun game. Not suggested for kids under the age of 16 because of the language and violence that happens. Plus the wrong ideas that teens get about police officers. This product came fast in the mail which is a super plus, i was very satisfied!

True Crime:New York City is the second game in the True Crime series and to be honest its a wasted idea thanks to clumsy gameplay, broken driving system, an average story and the most important crime this game has to offer is that the whole game is riddled with glitches one glitch in particular in the xbox version that wont let you progress on in the story. The only thing this game has going for it is its gritty atmosphere and the story but even that is average at best. The characters are voiced by well known talents and do a superb job but the story was just too average for them. The graphics are good and the gritty dark atmosphere looks and makes NY look like a crime ridden city.
But there are ton of pop ins and slow downs that take you out of the experience. The control for the main character are slow and unresponsive, sometimes making foot chasing last longer then they should be.
All in all True crime NY is a game that feels rushed and not well tested; how this game got out in the market is a mystery but if your going to play it play it on the ps2 or gamecube which I've been told is equally buggy.

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.