True Crime Preview

There's a pretty bizarre moment in the original True Crime: Streets of LA where it transforms from an expected hip-hop laden urban crime game into a poor knockoff of Big Trouble In Little China. Instead of remaining consistent, the game decided to stop having you take on thugs, and started having you fight zombies, dragons, and flying skulls. Well, I can safely say that even though I've only seen a small snippet of the upcoming (and subtitle-less) True Crime, from the way executive producer Stephen van der Mescht describes it, there won't be a crazy "why did I go from shooting guys to punching dragons?" moment in this next installment.

In fact, True Crime is a complete reboot. Not only is it an entirely new game and locale (not an unfamiliar thing, since the previous two games changed main characters and switched from Los Angeles to New York), but an entirely different developer, United Front Games.

For story context, van der Mescht shows off an early mission where the player, as undercover detective Wei Shan, gets tasked with raiding a manufacturing plant of a rival Triad group, and kidnapping the manager. The dialogue and scenario of this mission is played relatively straight, with a couple bits of humor. "Tonally, we've been influenced by Hong Kong cinema like Infernal Affairs and Triad Election -- we even looked at The Departed since that's a remake of Infernal Affairs," comments van der Mescht. Besides the tone, van der Mescht uses notable cop movies to illustrate gameplay systems; "our chases shouldn't feel like superhero chases like in other games; we want them to feel like a foot race that you'd see in Point Break or Se7en or even Casino Royale."

After the cutscene, as Wei steps out onto the street, one can see the benefit of going into HD in True Crime's depiction of Hong Kong. Besides seeing all the pretty HD lights, van der Mescht points out that True Crime will not have a GPS-accurate rendition of Hong Kong. He elaborates, "[It's] less about faithfully recreating Hong Kong like the first two games, and more about creating a space that works for gameplay while still maintaining some authenticity of Hong Kong." The mission for this demo takes place in "North Point," which is actually modeled after Kowloon (instead of the actual North Point).

Afterwards, Wei drives on over to the manufacturing plant where his target is located, and gets to work. Interestingly, a lot of this demonstration makes True Crime look like a brawler; there's a fair mix of punching, blocking, countering, and even weapons and environmental items. When Wei isn't countering some fool or punching someone in the face, he's grabbing kitchen knives and meat cleavers, or slamming dumpster lids onto heads.

Though, even in this limited demo, Wei does smoothly move between kicking guys and then grabbing a gun and popping some shots off. I suspect that the triggers are used for the guns and the face buttons for melee, and that the animators have been spending a lot of time making transitions from fist-to-gun and so forth. As mentioned earlier, the team doesn't want players to feel any sort of stiff or awkward transitions between guns, melee, and movement -- the player should easily be able to move quickly between those systems.

Actually, this feeling of quickly moving from one gameplay type to another sort of reflects an overall sense of "fastness" to the game. For example, at one point, Wei has to escort his target out of the plant. Instead of a traditional escort mission where you sit around and wait for the A.I. guy to catch up, Wei simply grabs the dude and drags him along; van der Menscht notes, "even our escort missions feel faster than in other games." Heck, he points out that "[the] car driving model is more akin like Burnout than GTA4. GTA4 went a bit simmy, I felt, in terms of driving the car -- we're more about arcadey feel and instant gratification."

There's still a lot of True Crime left to see before its fall release. Stuff like side activities (races, gambling, side jobs), or other areas, but overall, I can already see that it's a more serious, consistent, and "faster" reboot of the franchise. I'll check for confirmation next time, but I'm pretty confident that there will be no zombies or dragons in this one.


Originally posted on 1UP.