GTA IV - LCPD:FR

Liberty City Police Department: First Response

Game: Grand Theft Auto IV & Episodes From Liberty City

Type: Script Mod

My Rating: 95%

Website: http://www.lcpdfr.com/page/index.html

I've been meaning to talk about the mod since this blog started, as people who have visited my Youtube channel will be aware, I spend alot of time using this mod. Never in my entire time of playing games have I come across a mod that's had such a profound impact on that game. Before this mod GTA IV was a decent game for me: good for messing about and a decent storyline to play through, enjoy and forget. Then I discovered this mod and now I spend most of the time playing games on EFLC (the mod works for both GTA IV and EFLC). It adds a whole new lease of life to the game and it was this mod; the hard work and dedication to an excellent idea that completely changed the game for me, that inspired me to start giving praise and reviews to the individuals and teams that make great mods for games.

So what is it? LCPD:FR is a fairly comprehensive police simulator for GTA:IV. Rather than taking just one mission, LCPD:FR allows you to take on the role of a police officer in Liberty City. It's not a complete police simulator (hence the name First Response), so there's no investigations and bureaucracy - which is a good thing. Instead, you can drive or walk around the city, stopping cars and pedestrians for suspicious behaviour (or even for the hell of it) or waiting for an incident to get phoned to you, such as muggings, domestic abuse and suicide calls. I'll spit these into "callouts" and "patrols" and discuss them in detail.

Callouts

Callouts are when you are dotting about and a call comes in for you to attend an incident. You do have the option of taking the incident or not (useful if you are roleplaying a certain role like armed response), or the option of a "busy" status so you don't receive callouts. Callouts always follow a well working formula: you go with blues and twos to the scene of the incidents and deal with the suspect. In muggings and domestic calls, you try and apprehend the suspect. In suicide calls, theres a nice little quite time event where you have to "talk the suspect down" by hitting a key when a bar is in the green area of a moving slider. Get it right and the suspect puts the gun down, get it wrong.... you'll need crime scene clean up! Sometimes you can get called to a gang shooting, which aren't massively realistic (at least not from a UK standpoint) as its about 20 people with guns shooting up the town, but they are pretty fun and really make you use the mods other features, which I'll discuss later.

Patrols

On patrol, you drive or walk around city looking for crime. Sometime crime comes to you: you can be parked up at a traffic light when a pursuit goes blazing by or maybe you'll turn a corner and there's a fight on the pavement. Maybe you'll find crime: doing stop checks on vehicles and pedestrians can bring out some unsavoury characters. Of course, people don't always want to stop to talk to the police and foot chases and vehicles pursuits are rife! The nice thing I like about the mod is that as well as scripted crime, the game's AI does alot of accidental crime, like crashes and missing red lights, which fits in with the mod like a charm - you can stop a vehicle for dangerous driving or just let it slide - the discretion is yours. 

The Mechanics

I could rattle on for absolute hours about this mod (and I would really like to!) but I'll keep this as short as I can. The reality is, it's all just random number generators: will a car pull over for you, will they be wanted, how will they react to being arrested - do they take it, or do they pull a gun and fight for freedom - but it really flows and ensures a great variety of outcomes for callouts and patrols. When in a pursuit, other police cars nearby will join in the chase and try and "help you" (help, being very generous due to the ridiculous driving the AI can pull off sometimes). You can also call out other vehicles to help and helicopters too. On foot, you can call for regular backup or SWAT teams to help you on the ground. All the features in the game are actuated by quite an extensive set of keys: with only a few keys being used by the vanilla game, this leaves the rest of the keyboard to be used in place of menus. There is a menu that overrides the vanilla police computer, that you can use to check the identity of people and call for backup and services. All things together, the interface is fairly easy to use once you get used to it and works fairly well in dealing in quick-paced situations. 

The Community

One thing that does speak for this mod, is the sheer numbers of the community following for it, with over 100,000 registered members. There is even an extensive list of mods made to accompany and supplement this one. These range from vehicle skins to plugins to give you more diverse crime. One of these mods worth noting is the Emergency Lighting System (ELS) which allows developer to make cars that utilise realistic light bars and customisable lights patterns. These can be tweeked by the user to get the lights they want for their cars. I, for example, decided to replace all my police cars with British police cars, which requires setting the lights to be blue and white, rather than white and red which the vanilla game uses. 

Issues

Overall, the mod is really well constructed. Unfortunately, the game is not: I tend to get only around 45 minutes of playing before it CTD's (unmodded or not). This sets the scene: the issues I have with the mod are limitations of the base game itself. The AI behaviour and spawning errors make up the bulk of issues, with no backup turning up from time to time and the AI crashing into and killing everything, which kills the whole mood really. 

However, the timing of this article isn't a coincidence: LCPD:FR have just announced a preview to the first non-beta release and it looks great! They've completely reworked all the scripting, you can check out the preview at http://www.lcpdfr.com/page/features.html/_/lcpdfr-preview. I'll do an another review when it's released. Most people I know are looking forward to GTA V, I'll be looking forward to LCPD:FR 1.0!

This review really doesn't do the mod the justice it deserves and I've no doubt missed out a good few features. To see more of what is offered, you can check out my videos on my channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/hibblejaybob) or on a channel I enjoy alot: http://www.youtube.com/user/SpeirsTheAmazingHD who did a great series "Speirs on Patrol". You can also just Youtube search LCPDFR and look at the many great videos by other developers. Even as the beta release now, I'd seriously recommend giving it a try; it breathes a complete new life into the game!

Thanks for reading.