The game opens with Nick Kang, the hero of the story, returning to the police for under the EOD division. The EOD is essentially just like regular policemen except they're extreme and are allowed to do things like shoot elderly people in the knees and only suffer the consequences of having a point taken off of their Good Cop tallies. The story winds its way through various chapters in which you are presented several opportunities to put the kibosh on crime while freely roaming Los Angeles. As you drive, you will receive occasional APBs on various disturbances. How you handle them is up to you. You can approach criminals and flash your badge at them. The problem with this is that they usually just run away. You can fire a warning shot in the air, but this usually leads to them freaking out and killing you. You could also simply ignore it, but in my opinion you seriously need the parental supervision the warning label says you do if you want to use anything other than excessive force on everyone. Below are some examples of some crimes you will come across and handy ways to solve them.

Rape in Progress:

One of the most frequent crimes occuring in True Crime is rape, and I don't just mean your average scheme of dragging the first chick to pass out at a party to a broom closet. The hundreds of rapists in L.A. all seem to lurk the sidewalks in broad fucking daylight in search of anything in which they can stick they're polygonal penises. After finding a suitable woman, most L.A. rapists simply shove a woman down and begin a hurried match of fully-clothed Greco-Roman wrestling with her. This is usually the first thing you see when you stumble onto the scene and it poses the question of whether you should shoot the perp in the back of the head or attempt to force your character to play the theme from Rocky to help set the mood.

How to Handle the Situation:
Usually I do my civic duty of squeezing back on the trigger until there's nothing left but a pile of dead rapist. After which I often chase down the victim because she has been soiled with his evil and needs the cleansing powers of my bullet shower to heal her filthy, filthy soul.

The Southside Vampire:

There is a guy in True Crime who calls himself the Southside Vampire who daily hijacks ambulances carrying blood. The true mystery to cracking open this case is not a matter of finding the guy. After all, not many blood-crazed maniacs drive around all willy nilly in ambulances. That's insane even for Los Angeles standards. The true mystery is why a guy who neither bursts into flames when in direct sunlight nor plays Vampire the Masquerade is running amok. Another mystery is how he returns from the dead to commit the exact same crime after taking numerous rounds from twin glocks, but that is a story best left between God and Tupac.

How to Handle the Situation:
As every horror movie has taught me, the best way to kill the undead is with a huge explosion. Fortunately, ambulances are full of a liquid I like to call HIGH OCTANE FUN!

Hostage Situations:

How to Handle the Situation:
It takes either years of training or one Samuel L. Jackson movie to become a hostage negotiator. My guess is that Nick went with the latter. As a beacon of truth and justice, I feel it is my responsibility to use my superb gunmanship and pinpoint accuracy to zoom in on the criminal in question. Talking is overrated anyway. Taking very careful aim, I center my sights on the criminals gun arm hoping the bullets being fired at me do not connect. Then I always pretend Nick has a sudden coughing spasm which causes his gun arm to reflexively jerk right and his finger to instinctively empty an entire clip into both hostage and hostage taker.

Muggers with Screwdrivers:

Only 2% of L.A.'s criminals actually bother mugging people with conventional weapons such as guns, knives, or trout. The other 98% mug people with strange, exotic weapons such as broken Country Time Lemonade bottles, something that looks like a ruler with a nail through it, and what I assume is supposed to be a screwdriver. These seedy thugs stop at nothing to get what they want and they'll hold up anyone to get it. All hardware-related crime aside, these criminals really get down and dirty when they find their prey, and get down they do! Most of them simply stand in front of their intended victims doing something like a cobra dance, which I suppose is what hypnotizes the victims into just standing there while they continue to not get robbed.

How to Handle the Situation:
I'm Nick Kang, a hard-boiled cop who don't take nothin' from nobody, so how do you think I handle this situation? If you answered with several punches and/or kicks to the cranium followed by one of several kung fu moves so lethal that you may die from just watching it, you're absolutely right.

To say True Crime has a large number of button combinations would be to say that the sky is kind of high, and the main problem with this is that playing the game requires you to spend the first 45 minutes just pausing to refer to the helpless charts in the instruction manual. Even then, the odds of you fucking something up are pretty high. For example, several times have I found myself attempting to arrest a perp and accidentally shattered the poor guy's arm. Other times, I have attempted to shatter the arm of an AK-47 packing, bikini-clad woman and found myself doing some crazy flip into the front end of an El Camino which would then continue to drive with my body attached to it for mile or so.

All in all, True Crime delivers a steady if not stupid storyline complete with a level in which you abruptly find yourself shooting vampires and zombies while en route to a 300 year old criminal. It is a solid game worthy of a rent, but the shortness of it may cause you to leave it off of your wish list this year. Check it out.