When not under the clock in one of the timed missions you’ll get periodic radio calls about crimes in progress in your vicinity. You can choose to ignore these street crime incidents without negative consequences and just continue on to your next mission location. If you do respond to the calls, your next mission will wait for you and you can earn some positive karma and “shields” for arresting the criminals. Like the story missions these crimes will come in both foot and car chase form. They range from simple domestic squabbles to pursuit of rape suspects and even include some run-ins with celebrities. These criminal pursuits add some variety to the game and extend the gameplay since you can basically roam around the city responding to police calls for as long as you’d like. When you get down to it, however, chasing down an abusive husband plays about the same as chasing down a fleeing celebrity, which in turn is much like pursuing a murderer… Before too long responding to the calls will begin to feel repetitive and you’ll just stick with the story missions unless you really need to earn a few shields.

When attempting to arrest suspects you’ll have the choice of going into fight or shooting mode. The game gives your weapons infinite ammunition but balances that out with slow reload times between clips. Both modes start out pretty basic, the fight mode giving you a couple of punches and the gun mode a basic aim and click cursor. As you earn shields during the game, you’ll have the opportunity to stop off at various training centers and exchange your shields for the chance to earn a new skill. These skills will provide you with new attack moves or improve your gunplay – for example by allowing you to identify key points to shoot on a target suspect or car with a change in color of the targeting cursor.

While the various attack moves make for more excitement and a more visually interesting game, True Crime takes a lot of the fun out of the fights because of its poor control scheme. True Crime began life as a console game, and it’s like the developers simply mapped the gamepad movements straight to the keyboard ... while neglecting to add PC gamepad support to the game. Running and chasing suspects is extremely awkward if you need to do anything other than run in a straight line. Panning and strafing are awkward and often near impossible, making it far too difficult to change direction and chase a suspect who has turned around and run the other way. It gets even more frustrating when you are fighting one or more enemies hand to hand. You will often find them attacking you from behind while you struggle to turn around to face your attacker. To say chasing down and fighting suspects can sometimes be very frustrating is an understatement – True Crime’s poor control scheme has a direct and negative impact on your enjoyment of the game.

Controlling cars is a little easier, but not by much. It is easier to turn corners while driving than while running, but the cars all feel much too light when cornering and swerving and they all seem to have overly light suspensions. Also, there’s no discernable difference between the various cars, so the driving experience is the same whether you “borrow” a hot little sports car or a big sedan. The game models location-based damage on the cars, so you can shoot out tires or crumple your bumpers. The cars can actually take an extreme amount of damage, which is a good thing considering how much swerving and fishtailing you’ll be doing.

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