Price: £39.99 Players: 1 Widescreen: Yes 60Hz: No Dolby Digital 5.1 sound: Yes Xbox Live-enabled: No True Crime: Streets of L.A. was a game heavily promoted by its distributor and one that looked like it would have it all, but just how wrong could I be? You take the role of rogue Elite Operations Division maverick cop Nick Kang, whose ruthless reputation of making you the oriental version of 'John McClane' has landed you the nasty task of taking down the Chinese Triad and Russian Mafia cartel that's turned Los Angeles into a war zone. Sounds like the whole thing you could base a movie on, yes? Well, let's hope not because once you've played it for a while you learn that the gameplay becomes incredibly repetitive.

As you make your way about town, you'll realise that each mission bases itself around to different aspects - driving and fighting. The driving missions including getting from A to B in a set time, tailing a car while trying to remain unspotted - a mission that really feels empty, or simply driving to another destination. Along the way there's the chance to solve street crimes that come up in your 'copper' capacity, but this generally involves just shooting people in the street or running them over, the latter of which is easier and after a few of these you won't even bother and will just want to get the level over and done with. Also, the driving sections are always going to be compared with the Grand Theft Auto games and it's definitely not as much fun as those. I was going to add that this game might tide you over until the Xbox double pack of those is released, but they're out now so you know the choice to make... Then there's fighting. It's not as good as a Virtua Fighter game by a long shot and quite difficult to get to grips with. In fact, it suffers the same problems as Dead or Alive 3 in that as you move towards an opponent, it just pushes them backwards making them appear to 'glide' across the floor, which is really maddening. And with games out there of the calibre of the Soul Calibur series, you just can't afford to do things by half-measures these days. At least you can skip the missions, but seeing as they're largely all the same then you may as well switch the machine off.

As for the graphics, they're not very polished and contain lots of jaggies, as if you're not really playing an Xbox game at all. The FMV sequences look better though. The Dolby Digital 5.1 sound is the best thing about the game, although I turned off the in-built music in favour of my own selections. There are scores of hip-hop tunes and if you don't like hip-hop then you'll, of course, turn them all off. Gameplay-wise, handling is quite clumsy when trying to shoot lots of guys at once since the cross-hairs don't often focus on the nearest and most threatening baddie to you, thus putting you at a disadvantage. Also, turning while sneaking about on those levels that require it isn't easy. Other things that annoyed me including the fact that it autosaves all the time, which isn't always necessary, surely? Also, by level 4 I was at -67 in the Good/Bad cop rating because I'd killed so many innocent people while driving badly, but this made no difference whatsoever! True Crime: Streets of L.A. tries to be a jack of all tradfes but is clearly master of none. And there's also an appearance by self-confessed bad-boy rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg, yet he's just a complete wuss with little talent to keep him going, but there's enough mugs out there to buy his tat.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2004.