Los Angeles. The City of Angels, den of vice and rampant crime, bad pollution and even worse traffic, as well as having more celebrities per square mile than anywhere else in the world (except maybe the Betty Ford Clinic). It is home to more TV shows and movies than you could possibly count, and did I mention the rampant crime? The crime problem is so bad, that Luxoflux decided there was no place better to set their first (in a hopefully long-lived series) of True Crime games. Naturally there's actually nothing true about the crimes, unless you consider waging street battles with hookers or duking it out with Dominatrixes and ancient Chinese dragons all in a day's work'

I was hoping to avoid the acronym, but it's hard to describe True Crime without mentioning GTA. Both are third person action/adventure titles that see you driving in cars, completing missions, shooting things, and well, shooting things. But True Crime has added a delicious new element to the potent formula: kung fu. Before you groan and moan about the prevalence of Hong Kong influenced martial arts, it works a treat in True Crime. Rather than playing the bad guy, True Crime puts you in the boots of Nick Kang, temporarily suspended detective of the LAPD. For an inexplicable reason, you're reassigned to the Elite Operations Division which has even more power and jurisdiction than your old job, and more opportunity to behave like a loose cannon if you so please.

Yep, True Crime treads in the footsteps of dozens of b-grade cop movies, games and books, and coupled with the cheesy dialogue, it's a wonder they didn't call the game True Crime: Streets of Clich' instead. Which isn't a bad thing, as it all works and is great fun if you throw away your preconceptions. The convoluted story plays out over a series of self contained chapters with half a dozen or so missions in each. Rather than being full on involving, many are just 'go to location X' which gives you a good chance to cruise around and pick up optional missions from your police scanner. These are great fun, and range from the serious 'husband has wife at gunpoint' to the downright ludicrous 'disperse the crazed anti-video game protestors' There's much fun to be had in following up these leads, but they are in no way compulsory.

Visually, True Crime is all over the place. Some aspects are really well done, while others seem almost unfinished. For instance the character models look and move extremely well, it's quite dreamy watching the fights take place. The textures are pretty good too, but without some kind of anti-aliasing, they look downright ugly in a few of the cutscenes. The cars look alright, but aren't terribly detailed, yet the damage modeling is excellent and it's fun to smash them up. When you're on the move, the city looks amazing, and although I've never been to L.A. you get a fair sense of the place, sans the heavy traffic and smog of course! Once you're on foot though, a lot of the external textures are extremely low-res close up, and it really ruins the effect.

More disturbing though are the occasional graphical glitches and terrible clipping where you may end up fighting people in walls or even throwing/kicking them through a barrier on a bridge and have them walk on air back to you. It's annoying because it shatters the illusion of duking it out in L.A. but the worst comes where you or your car flies through a building and gets stuck in a dead zone you can't escape from. Thankfully these occurrences, much like the glitches, are fairly few and far between, but unpleasant nevertheless.

It has to be said right off the bat that if you don't like rap or R&B style music, you're going to hate True Crime's soundtrack with a passion. Gansta Rap, West Coast Rap, C-Rap, you name it, it's here. And although there is no mention of this on the game box or manual, if you have sensitive ears or younger kids around there is definitely plenty of material which may offend - expect excessive amounts of swearing and profanity. And again, although there is no mention of this anywhere in the manual, True Crime on Xbox does support custom soundtracks, so you can thankfully shut the noise off and replace it with something more to your style. Nevertheless, the music does suit the game pretty well, and despite hating rap I found myself enjoying cruising along to the phat tracks for awhile.

On the flipside, the audio in True Crimes is superb, especially the voice acting. The dialogue itself is about as corny and clich'd as you can possibly get, but the actors nail it perfectly and fit the stereotypes well. It's a B-Grade celeb-fest, with the likes of Christopher Walken, Michael Madsen, Ron Perlman and even Mako, the crazy wizard guy from the Conan movie! They clearly had some fun with it, and it rubs off well, providing a few laugh (and groan) out loud moments as you play. Kang himself comes off as pretty annoying, and his lines tend to get repetitive after awhile, but only because you hear them so frequently. The rest of the sound effects are also quite good, but they tend to just become background noise to the loud and proud rap soundtrack and the wise-cracking Kang.

True Crime has multiple endings, as well as a branching campaign structure to reach them. There are three possible paths you can take, and getting to the end of each involves a few extra chapters with half a dozen or more missions. It's optional to complete each three, but you won't get the full story if you don't. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Unlike virtually every other game around, True Crime doesn't require you to successfully complete any given mission. In fact, you don't have to complete any of them. If you're some kind of professional failure, you can get through the entire game (albeit receiving a poor ending) without actually chalking up a single win for Kang. This is actually a really great feature, because it totally eliminates the frustration factor of getting stuck on one of those unbearably annoying or tricky missions. You can just move on, and come back to tackle it later, with more experience and better moves and equipment.

This makes True Crime extremely accessible to all types of gamers, but the downside is it leads the game to be a little too easy to finish. Depending on how dedicated you are to completing all the missions and seeing all the endings, it shouldn't take more than 20 hours to beat. There's a reasonable amount to unlock though, with plenty of upgrades to earn in the form of new cars, guns and combos as well as more specific upgrades for each, such as laser sights for your handguns and a nitrous oxide boost for your car. Unlocking them all can be quite a challenge, and at times frustrating due to that painfully useless radar and map making it difficult to find the upgrade spots.