One of last year's more entertaining games on the consoles was undoubtedly True Crime: The Streets of LA The game combined driving, shooting, and fighting into a crazy Hollywood style action package that provided crazy amounts of excitement. Guns, kung fu, dirty language, slow motion, copious amounts of blood, high-speed car chases… Yep, it's all here. Unfortunately, upon release to the three major consoles True Crime lacked polish and included a great number of bugs and glitches. Offering much better graphics, new features, and an on-line mode, True Crime is back for fans of the game as well as PC gamers. However, is the PC version worth buying? I will try to answer the question in this review.

As the name suggests, True Crime takes place in Los Angeles with over 240 square miles of the city area with a pretty high level of accuracy. You play the role of Nick Kang, a recently suspended LAPD detective who has been recruited by the EOD (Elite Operations Division) to deal with the escalating illegal activity by the Chinese and Russian mafias and to restore general order within the city limits.There are eight major episodes, which are broken into missions that typically involve one of three major types of gameplay: driving, shooting and kung-fu fighting. When you get a lead you drive to a destination to follow up upon it; while driving to a location various crimes are going on throughout the city, which you will get calls on your radio to resolve. It's just your choice, if you wish you can continue on your way to your destination, or you can go and resolve the situation. Depending on how you solve crimes and confront suspects, a meter in the HUD will range between "good cop" and "bad cop" ratings. If you choose to help out and arrest the suspects without lethal force you get the good cop points. But if you kill a civilian, you'll lose the good cop points. The rating determines whether or not you're a good cop, and influences which ending you get when you finish the game. It isn't too much of a problem since you can always replay missions.

The PC version also features online multiplayer up to four players through Gamespy or a Local Area Network (LAN). Modes included are Street Racing, Dojo Master (last-man-standing like mode where you fight opponents by Kung-Fu), Battle Master (last-man-standing like mode where you fight opponents with weapons), Police Chase (1 player is the criminal, the others are cops), and The Beat (you're a cop on patrol looking to rack up more arrests than your buddies before the timer runs out). You can choose your appearance from any of the characters that appear in the single-player game, as well as from a number of new skins. I played several LAN matches, but got bored pretty fast, especially because of excessive lag. Unfortunately, the lag issues were frequent during online matches and the game even crashed a couple of times.

Talking about things not included in the console versions, the PC version has also new weapons like a crossbow, Baseball Bat, and rocket launcher, as well as new character skins which are based on "Activision all-star" characters, such as Pitfall Harry, Officer Dick from the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series, Jeanette from Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines, Rikimaru from Tenchu, a soldier from Call of Duty, and a character known only as "Sandwich Man," who is dressed up in, of all things, a sandwich suit) and extras like training videos and cinematics.

What about controls? The console gamepad controls have been translated to the familiar WASD interface, and the mouse is used to look and shoot (left clicking the mouse will allow you to shoot while driving the car). Sadly, the shooting interface can be a pain in the ass at times, mostly when it comes to steering in the driving mode and moving around to combat enemies beside and behind you in the shooting mode.

Overall, True Crime is far from perfect itself, the controls are particularly awkward and multiplayer is half-baked. Also, there are plenty of glitches as well, usually involving clipping or rendering the game surface. That's why 72% is pretty fair rating, in my opinion.

Though it is not the greatest port from console to PC, it can be worth playing. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to keep occupied while you're waiting for the next Grand Theft Auto sequel.

Minimum System Requirements: Pentium III 800MHz processor or AMD 1.5 Ghz Athlon processor, 128 MB RAM, 3D Hardware Accelerator (32 MB VRAM) with full T&L, DirectX 9.0 or higher compatible sound card, 32-bit 4xCDROM (with 600kb/s xfer rate), 3.1GB free HDD space.
Multiplayer: Internet (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP) play supported, Internet play requires broadband connection and latest drivers

* True Crime has been tested on many, but not all, of the major video cards incorporating the chipsets listed below: ATI Radeon 8500, ATI Radeon 9500, ATI Radeon 9800, NVidia GeForce 256, NVidia GeForce 2 MX, NVidia GeForce 2 GTS, NVidia GeForce 2 Ultra, All NVidia GeForce 3/Ti series, All NVidia GeForce 4 series