I’m a fan of the “guy in a city” game genre, as I call it (GTA and the like). I played Sleeping Dogs years back and loved it, but even though I’d heard that it was a descendant of these old True Crime games, I’d also heard that they were so much worse that they just weren’t bothering with. Fast forward to now, and now that I’ve actually properly played an old PS2-era GTA game, I’m much more curious about its contemporaries than I used to be. This is a pretty hard game to find (let alone for cheap) out here in Japan, and I was lucky enough to find it for a pretty darn good deal at Book Off a few months back. Given that I also finally came across a cheap copy of GTA: San Andreas recently too, I decided it was finally time to dive into these GTA wannabees before I looked more into the old GTA games. Playing with the English dub and Japanese subtitles, it took me almost dead-on 9 hours to get all 3 endings of the game and complete every chapter.
Streets of LA follows the story LAPD cop Nick Kang. He’s got a reputation as a hell of a loose cannon, and he actually starts the story already suspended from duty (for a reason we’re never told). However, regardless of the reasons, the chief of police flags him down because she needs him back. Gang violence in LA is at an all time high, and it’s clear that something huge is going down, and Nick is the only guy who can stop it. While Nick is reluctant at first, he takes the chief’s offer to join the exclusive Elite Operations Division (EOD) and bring peace back to the titular streets of LA (no matter how much damage he may eventually cause doing it).
I’m of two minds about the writing in this game. On one hand, it is in many ways very much a cop story of its time, which is to say that it’s very heavy pro-cop propaganda. Nick’s loose cannon nature is constantly (rightly) criticized by his coworkers and colleagues, and their weariness of working with him is thankfully never invalidated with just what a menace he’s shown to be, but there’s still no shortage of very harmful depictions of the police and what they do that deify policework while effectively categorizing any kind of criminal as a subhuman undeserving of the same human rights as anyone else (even regardless of what the already criminal-hostile law said). In the modern day when cops and their actual role in protecting the public (or lack thereof) is much better appreciated, this comes off as incredibly crass in how it supports rightwing narratives around law and order.
On the other hand, the writing outside of that is actually nowhere near as grim as I’d otherwise expect a game from this era to be. While SoLA definitely buys into the harmful American (though far from just American) myth of police as a protector class for the downtrodden, they also thankfully really wholehearted buy into the national myth of America as a true melting pot of cultures and people. The cast is incredibly diverse for a game from ’03, and even Nick himself is half-Chinese. It means the game ends up having basically none of the “funny” foreign accent-related humor that plagues this decade (and so many others), and the game’s tone is much stronger for it.
Similarly, while I’m not for a minute going to suggest that there’s no misogyny at all in this game’s writing (Nick is enough of a sexist pig to make that impossible), this game is actually remarkably good in how it treats the women in its story. Nick is quickly given a partner for this operation, and with her being a conventionally attractive woman (especially one who’s quickly regulated to information support work back at HQ rather than going around with Nick directly), the obvious assumption most people would make is that she’ll end up with him by the end of the story. His efficacy in the field will push away her initial read of him as a pigheaded moron, and she’ll fall deeply in love with his protector spirit. But that never happens! Rosie is allowed to just genuinely not be into him like that, and while she does have to put up with his stupid jokes (in a way that’s at least addressed), Nick actually doesn’t “get the girl” in any of the game’s 3 endings nor does Rosie have to die for contrived reasons.
This remarkable (albeit relative) lacking of casual racism and sexism ends up playing very well into the writing’s actual strongest quality: This game is genuinely very funny. SoLA takes a TON of inspiration from action movies (both old and new) for its mission designs and set pieces but also its humor too. I’m admittedly not nearly familiar enough with the genre to appreciate them, comments from my friends informing me of them as they happened were super appreciated. Beyond that, Nick isn’t just a loose cannon: He’s a goofball. He’s constantly quipping and even lightly breaking the fourth wall at times, but he’s still taking the mystery and case at hand seriously. It ends up striking a really good balance with just how absurd the story’s plot eventually gets. While it’s not my favorite comedy ever, I’d still say it’s overall aged a fair bit better than even a contemporary sillier GTA like Vice City, and I’m nothing less than floored that a comedy-focused game from 2003 has managed to age so well.
But the comedy can be as strong or weak as it wants. This is a video game, so what about the mechanics? They’re a very interesting take on the kind of gameplay experience that GTA 3 began making, but there’s a LOT of rough edges here that make this less than easy to go back to. Much like a typical GTA or “guy in a city” game, this is an open world game centered around missions to progress the story alongside optional missions too. However, SoLA has a much more rigid structure than GTA’s in many ways. The game takes place across 12-ish chapters composed of discrete missions within those chapters. Rather than the world map being a constant that you’re wandering around and missions being destinations you go to when you want to activate them, you’re technically always undergoing a mission in SoLA. Depending on where you are in the story, you may need to progress through several stages of the current chapter’s missions before you’re effectively able to “free roam” and go around the city at your leisure again (though you can always go back to an earlier chapter’s point and load without losing any progress if you just want to go back and free roam rather than struggle on your current story mission if you like).
While it was definitely an odd and unfamiliar structure for one of these games, it wasn’t nearly as bad or constricting as I feared it would be, and it ends up giving the game a really nice pacing and better than expected checkpoints too (still not great, but better than expected at least XD). Pretty much every activity you do across a chapter’s missions takes the place of one of those individual stages. Where most other games in this fashion have tons of multi-part missions that require driving, fighting, driving again, then another activity, and failing one of them sets you back to the start of the whole thing, SoLA ends up mostly avoiding that by the nature of its mission design. The checkpoints still aren’t perfect (as they effectively don’t exist at all outside of these hard load points), but they’re still good enough that I felt it was worth specifically commending them here.
At least compared to the very ambitious weird and wild mission types you’d see in a GTA game of this era, there isn’t a terribly great variety in the missions, but they’re usually well composed enough for what they are. You’ve got driving to a location within a time limit, gunfights through a location, tailing another car in your own car, stealth sections, and melee brawls using the dedicated melee system. Though it may not have the ambition in its story mission design that GTA does, it ends up being usually a lot better balanced and polished as a result. “Usually”, however, is the very unfortunate operative word in that sentence though XD
Addressing the various aspects of gameplay one at a time, you first have the gunfights. Anyone who’s played a contemporary GTA game will be floored at how easy it is, frankly, and to me that was absolutely a good thing XD. Compared to the super awkward auto-aiming and such that I’m used to from Vice City, SoLA has a very explicitly indicated and well done auto targeting system for Nick’s weapon of choice: dual-wielding pistols. Mashing the R1 button can fire as fast as you can press it, and as long as you’re generally facing the right way towards enemies, you’ll take them down no problem. They even manage to make more accurate aiming a lot less painless by taking a page from Max Payne’s book and giving you temporary slow-motion upon zooming in, which makes the accurate shots you’ve actually got to take way easier. While I’d definitely hesitate to call this game “easy”, the shooting missions were by far the most fun, and it was always a relief when I got to do one of those instead of a brawling mission.
This is largely because the brawling just isn’t very good. It’s far from the worst 3D combat system I’ve seen, but it’s still implemented weirdly enough that it never felt like anything more than a slightly skill-based button mashing contest. You’ve got three face buttons for low, medium, and high attacks, and your fourth button is for throwing with block bound to a shoulder button. Hitting an enemy enough times will initiate momentary slow-motion where you can input special button combos to execute high damage finishing moves, too. However, it just doesn’t work reliably enough to actually feel nice. Enemies seem to block as much as they want with impunity, and their own moves are usually far too fast or strangely animated to do anything but just start blocking when they begin a super armor combo. Most melee fights aren’t *that* difficult, thankfully, and even the hardest of them usually have a weapon for you to pick up somewhere to make things a bit easier, but it’s definitely one of the game’s less polished areas. The stealth sections are also pretty easy though nothing to write home about. They're a bit too fiddly for their own good at times, but it's *usually* quick and easy enough to regain lost progress once you know where the patrols actually are.
Then there are the driving missions. These are honestly alright, but they’re a very mixed bag for several reasons. The first major reason is just how the game is balanced. The tailing missions, at least, are never too hard. Targets will actually take slightly randomized paths to their destination, which is a pretty darn cool feature, and the very clear indication on the UI of how close or far you should be makes them one of the easier driving mission types too, even if there are a few too many of them and they can tend to go on a bit too long. The time limit driving missions, however, are FAR harder, and they’re easily one of the game’s hardest aspects. These time limits are often incredibly tight, and I was hitting missions I could barely pass (we’re talking reaching my goal with less than a second left) after several retries and route optimizations as early as chapter 4. These are made a lot less brutal if you can manage to upgrade to the first or second new car, but that runs into issues with the upgrade system, which is a whole new (much larger can of worms).
Before I can talk about the upgrades themselves, I’ve gotta talk about the last major system I’ve yet to speak of, which is the police scanner missions. As you walk or drive around the map, you’ll get radio broadcasts from your police scanner telling you about crimes nearby. These crimes can be simple as some maniac attacking an innocent bystander or even stopping a hijacked bus without harming the passengers. Whatever the crime, you’ve got two major incentives to address them. Granted, both of these can also be earned from normal story missions too, but the street crimes are infinitely spawning, so they’re your easiest source of more goodies if you’re struggling with a story mission. The first one is your karma points. Stopping criminals nonviolently will get you good karma points, and stuff like headshot-ing bad guys or killing innocent people will get you bad karma points. It’s a bit of a pain to earn good karma points, but having higher good karma is how you unlock the better endings (and the many extra chapters that lead to them), so it’s worth being careful with your driving and learning to tackle and arrest criminals if you want to actually see the proper end to the story. Being a cop, you don’t really have a “wanted level” GTA-style, so this is a neat albeit flawed system to get you to not simply wantonly murder people simply because you can.
The other reward you get from stopping crimes is what I just came to call “cop points”. Getting 100 cop points gets you an extra badge, and badges are what you spend to *attempt* an upgrade challenge. Upgrade challenges are not easy and can be failed pretty quick with how hard some are, and it can feel really bad to lose a whole 100 cop points just because you didn’t know what you were doing. Heck, you even lose like 50 cop points for each death you take, so you’re not even safe if you’re struggling on story missions. Thankfully, there are some nice tricks you can use to make that system less awful. You honestly get way more cop points than you really need by the end of the story, so you shouldn’t feel too pressured to do tons of street crimes just to grind cash at the start. Even more than that, while this game is crazy auto-save happy, saving whenever you start an activity of any kind, quitting back to the main menu before you actually finish the challenge you just messed up will mean you get to keep your cop points rather than lose them. Loading times are also remarkably quick in this game too, so despite the dozens of times I spent loading back to the main menu and then getting back to the mission to retry it, it never felt too terribly onerous for loading times.
The really onerous parts are down to OTHER factors, and boy howdy are they onerous. There are various aspects of SoLA’s design that are so horribly tedious and inconvenient for the player that I cannot possibly not call them out one by one. One of the biggest is the mere act of failing missions in the first place. The main reason that I grew so used to loading back to the main menu to retry stuff frankly wasn’t even mostly of conserving cop points. There’s no quick retry feature of any kind upon failing a mission. You spawn on the world map ages away, and you’ve gotta hop in your car and drive all the way back to the mission or upgrade challenge start point for another try at it. Just starting again from my spawn point from where that part of the chapter put me was generally just as fast if not much faster than properly losing and respawning, so I saw very little reason not to just load each time I lost rather than live with the time wasting consequences.
This would already be annoying in a GTA game (where very similar problems exist in SoLA’s contemporaries), but it’s way more annoying because those titular streets of LA are HUGE. This is a 240 square mile recreation of a very significant chunk of LA. It’s a really impressive achievement for the time in terms of technical limitations, but damn if it doesn’t make the game far harder to play than it needs to be. Even going along the main highway through the heart of the city in the fastest car in the game, it takes like 15~20 minutes to get from one end of the city to the other, and that’s on a straight road in a fast car. Getting back to a mission start location takes way too long because there’s no fast travel system and it’ll likely take you several minutes of just driving for every new attempt at a hard mission, and that’s barely the half of it.
The big in-game map is so far zoomed out that it’s nearly useless to see individual streets the vast majority of the time, but that frankly barely matters in the first place. It certainly matters during driving missions, of course. Being that this is a GTA-like game from ’03, there are no indications whatsoever as to how you should get to your target when you have a destination. All you have is a pip on the map, and how you get there is your responsibility to figure out. However, those green pips that show you where the mission start point is are the only markers on that map you’ll ever have. There are plenty of places around the city you’d want to frequent: clinics to heal, parking garages to swap to one of your unlocked special police cars, or repair places to mend a battered and wounded car, and none of those are indicated on your world map at all. Heck, even the upgrade challenge locations aren’t labeled at all on the map, so I had to get in the habit of taking screenshots of my capture software to even be able to remember where to travel back to for my retry once I managed to find an upgrade location.
And that’s before we get to the contents of the upgrade missions themselves. There are three different general stats to upgrade (driving, shooting, and brawling) and two levels of upgrade missions: Those blue ones that are hidden around the map, and special green ones at the end of each chapter. The actual value of each upgrade type varies a lot on the stat you’re upgrading, but the key issue they all share is that you start the game far too weak, so these upgrades end up being extremely valuable to finish the game at all. Your brawling isn’t too underpowered at the start, as most of the unlocks are just new finishing moves which are too finicky and difficult to pull off in the first place to be of much value, but there are still some basic moves you’ll unlock that will be very valuable to your eventual successes.
The gun missions end up being incredibly valuable, though. Your initial gun aiming speed and reload speed is awful, and it’ll take 4 or 5 gun upgrades before you’re having some real fun with the high reload speed to mow through enemies. The blue car missions were so viciously balanced that I never managed a single one, but unlike brawling and guns, the blue missions aren’t where the big value is for cars. Another key issue that the upgrade missions have is one that they share with the story missions’ content, and that’s their awful balance which varies massively from mission to mission. Getting a better car requires winning one of those green missions at the end of a chapter, and you’re going to have a nigh impossible time finishing the game (even with the worst ending) if you don’t have a car fast enough.
However, this is both an old GTA-type game and SoLA, so nothing is simple. Winning a new car requires winning a street race, and that is far easier said than done. These street races is where not having a path directing you towards the objective you’re driving towards hurts a LOT, because the AI opponents all know the right way to go immediately, and you have no way of knowing that other than trailing behind them and hoping you can keep up. The optimal routes to the finish line are also far from straight lines too, so it’s not the easiest thing to remember. Even if you just have a faster car than the opposition, these races have time limits too, so even if NO one, not even you, reach the finish line, you can still lose by default because you were just too slow. The first car upgrade mission is annoyingly the hardest by far, and to win it I not only had to memorize the names of the streets to get to our destination, but I also had to ditch my main car, steal a street racer’s car on the overworld, and use THAT to win because my default car was just that uselessly slow XD
That does bring me to a pretty cool part of all this abrasive, time wasting nonsense! Most of the aspects of realism do admittedly make this game far worse. Yeah, it’s a neat attention to detail that all the parking garages are generally on the eastern side of the city because that’s where they are in real life, but that’s cold comfort if you’re stuck with some NPC’s crappy car and you’re staring down a 30 minute round trip to go to some parking garage (which isn’t indicated on the map in the first place, mind you, you’d just have to know it’s there) and pick up a better car to beat some crazy hard timed racing mission. That stuff all sucks, and I really wish that the dev team had more adequately considered the gameplay ramifications of making such a colossal city that the player had to navigate.
However, it was genuinely a neat challenge to remember the streets to win that first upgrade race, because they actually really put in the effort to make the UI good enough to memorize the streets. This game honestly has really good UI (though it bizarrely lacks a speedometer), so tailing missions, brawls, and aiming your gun are never something you’ve gotta second guess. Even for driving, while you may not have a clear path on where to go, if you’re struggling, you can actually easily see the streets because the one you’re currently on and the one you’re about to intersect with are very clearly indicated at the top of the screen. While there may not be a lot to actually *do* in the massive streets of LA, the effort put in to making it feel like a place you can actually attempt to navigate street by street is so simple yet well done that I can’t help but respect it.
Sure, this game has a lot of rough edges that are going to turn away a lot of players, but the lengths the devs went through to make the game playable and possible regardless of the lack of quality of life features is a really interesting and engaging example of friction making an experience more memorable in how it makes you approach the experience. I’m not about to do a 180 and say that all the awful crap I just complained about is in fact somehow neither awful nor crap, but just how positive my feelings towards this game are despite all the headaches it put me through from time to time is a testament to just how well this game succeeds in being more than the sum of its parts.
The aesthetics of the game are very 2003, but they honestly still hold up pretty well. The animations on human movement in cutscenes and such are good enough that they still hold up, and where they don’t, they add really nicely to the campy tone of the rest of the game. The game runs quite well too, and it’s nice to see a game with a map this big run so nice and smoothly despite its huge scale. The voice performances are also great. Christopher Walken is having a ton of fun playing his bit part, but all the rest of the main cast do a great job of bringing this silly playable action movie to life as well. I didn’t spend a ton of time with the Japanese dub of the game, but what I heard of it was pretty darn good, and it’s just nice that it’s here in the first place given how few PS2-era games bothered doing that for their Japanese releases.
The music is also really fun. It’s a lot of hip hop, some metal, some rock, and even some 70’s funk too, and I appreciate that they didn’t go for all obvious choices. There were so many times where my ears perked up from how delightfully silly and weird the rhymes are in the hip hop songs they picked were, and that’s not counting the several different True Crime raps they had made just for this game XD. It really sucks that there’s no way to control the radio at all or what songs play when, but at least the soundtrack made for something that really did enhance and compliment the rest of the tone of the story.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As much as this game’s janky brawling and strict time limits drove me crazy, the silly encounters and campy story it gave me made me laugh and smile so much more that I can’t help but have positive memories of it. While this is definitely far from a perfect game, and it definitely has some rough edges and issues with repetition, the overall whole is worth far more than the sum of its parts. It has a lot of friction endemic to these early open world games, but it’s also genuinely one of the most fun I’ve had with one of these old GTA wannabees, and if you’re a fan of old GTA stuff, I think this will be a game well worth checking out for you.
