True Crime

The melee stuff is suitably brutal, filled with leg-breaks, cleavers through the spine, and showers of claret at every opportunity. When that gets dull, you can fling baddies into nasty bits of scenery too, wedging them into sparking circuit breakers where they twitch and smoulder (that's the non-George Clooney sort of smouldering, right?) or lobbing them over the edge of a gantry to pool quietly on the floor below. Lots of gantries in Hong Kong. They must use them for storing all those crates.

You can climb the scenery, too, should you wish to, with a neat little parkour system that highlights the edge of any interactive objects with an unobtrusive yellow bar. It's allowed True Crime's developers to build some pretty open arenas for brawling, with multi-level sections where you can either run and gun your way up the stairs or scamper over boxes to get the drop on people from an unexpected angle. Then there are the usual suspects like slow-mo gunplay and the table-sliding beloved of John Woo to take into account, too.

The reason you're doing all this scampering, shooting, cleavering and slow-moing is because you're an undercover cop on an ambiguous mission: your job is to infiltrate a Triad organisation and take them down from the inside. You're going have to do some unpleasant things along the way, possibly worse than sabotaging the Triad photocopier with the inside bits of a Biro, and the game is going to judge you for them too.

This is where True Crime flirts, briefly, with invention. The game's 'Face' system may not allow you to choose the ultimate direction for your character - United Front, the developer, leaves the sandbox stuff for tackling the objectives and has a linear storyline in mind for you from the start - but it still aims to change the kinds of missions open to you at any time and the way people react to you based on what you've done and how you've customised your character along the way.

Kill too many civilians (I'm guessing) and the cops will be a bit cheesed off at you. Wear a particularly evil tie (still guessing) and ladies will point at you on the street.

It's all about honour, apparently, and it might hopefully add a gentle spark to proceedings. Heaven knows, a gentle spark is what True Crime, for all its easygoing professionalism, looks to be in need of. After a quick developer playthrough and a chat with a producer, I'm left with a sense of fairly solid craftsmanship but little that makes the game truly stand out at this stage.

That seems somewhat unfair as, if you take apart the pieces - decent city, decent acrobatics, gooey finishers, light morality stuff - the game seems to be ticking a lot of people's favourite boxes. The problem is, it's headed into a crowded genre, and it has little to really make you pay attention.