True Crime

In the scenario we're being shown today, Wei has located the bloke he needs to keep alive. He grabs him by the scruff of the neck and marches him through the warehouse, using his other hand to shoot at anyone who gets in the way. Once outside the bloke slips from Wei's grasp and makes a break for it in his own hijacked car. Our hero gives chase on - wait for it - a motorbike.

"We spent a lot of time on the motorbike as one of the principle vehicles for getting around, just because it's that much easier to navigate around the city and it's a lot of fun," says Van der Mescht. "We brought the same kind of philosophy for the on-foot experience to the vehicle experience, so it's all about action. For example you can jump off the back of the bike right onto a car and comandeer it. Or you can jump off, pull out your gun while in mid-air and shoot the bike to make it explode - using it as a weapon, if you will."

But there's no time for that now. Wei's path is blocked by a police blockade - a long row of cars parked right across the road. He fires a hail of bullets and the cars explode in yet another giant ball of flame. True Crime is clearly taking cues from blockbuster action movies, but as Van der Mescht explains, not the same ones which inspired the first games.

"One of the watchwords for us through this entire experience has been authenticity," he says. "The first two True Crime games were a little more cartoony, a little more campy - they were more based on movies like Lethal Weapon and Rush Hour. Our influences have been movies like Infernal Affairs and the American remake, The Departed. So tonally, I think there's a massive shift in terms of what happened before and where this game is going."

Unlike Wei, the previous games failed to set the world alight - so what did United Front decide needed fixing in order to make this one a success? "You know, I don't really like to think of it as what needs to be fixed - more, 'Where can we take this?'" says Van der Mescht.

"I like to think of this game as being almost like a Robert Altman movie. There's an ensemble cast and everyone has their stories, and they interweave. That's kind of the way we've approached the open-world genre. You can have the best action mechanics in the world, but if the world is not alive, if you can't engage with it - you're dead right then."

Speaking of the open-world genre... No one in the room has mentioned the words Grand, Theft or Auto so far, but the comparison is inevitable. So how do Van der Mescht and O'Connell reckon this game stands up? Does True Crime have the potential to be a better game than GTA?

"I'm not going to say anything about whether it's going to be better or worse," says Van der Mescht. "We're going to do the best job we can, with the experience we have and the people we have, and we're going to put something out which I think we're going to be extremely proud of, and which is going to do really well.

"To answer the question more directly, everything we've done has been born from differentiation. Of course we're looking at GTA - that's the first place we look when we're differentiating. That's why we've gravitated towards spending a lot of time on the on-foot stuff, on a much deeper combat system, on creating a martial arts feel and integrating those pieces together."

And those elements aren't the only things which set True Crime apart, according to Van der Mescht. "The Hong Kong setting has not been used before, so that's something fresh and unique. From a thematic standpoint, going for the undercover cop angle - that's in distinct contrast to what you see in GTA or Saints Row.

"Every part of what we've done has been strategic in nature, to end up with something which is clearly differentiated," he continues. "Whether it's better or not, we'll leave that up to people to decide, but at the very least it will be competitive."

As so extensively discussed, GTA is by no means the only inspiration for True Crime. From Batman to Burnout, Ghost Recon to Ratchet & Clank, Robert Altman to Andrew Lau, there's a host of influences at work here. Then there's the extensive and varied experience of the team working on the game to consider. The question is whether all these elements will come together to engineer a series reboot as significant as United Front is promising. And never mind GTA, will it be as good as Bejeweled?