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REVIEW: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Reviewed on DS. Also on PSP (eventually) Developed by Rockstar Leeds. Published by Rock Star.

So GTA 1 and 2 could have easily been ported to the DS but Rock Star tried something different. They designed and made an entirely DS-focused game from the ground up. Chinatown Wars manages to cram everything you loved about the full size console GTA games without the empty feeling that the PSP entries left you with.

You play as Huang, a young rich punk whose daddy, a Liberty City crime boss is brutally killed. Huang arrives in Liberty City with revenge and ambition in his heart. After the first cutscene, you know they haven’t dumbed this down for kids. This game has a wickedly delicious and decidedly adult sense of humour.
So the mission structure is the same as every GTA since GTAIII. You travel to the mission briefing, then travel to where the mission takes place. Except here, you can skip cutscenes and skip the travel back to the mission area after you’ve been killed. HALLEFUCKINGLUJAH!

You control this with a mix of D pad + buttons for some actions and stylus for other things. The stylus is used for menu stuff, managing your email and GPS devices as well as minigames such as hot wiring cars, filling molotov cocktails with petrol at the filling station amongst other things. It generally works pretty well though I found (on my DS Phat at least) that I found driving smoothly quite impossible and my giant alien spannercrab-creature hands were cramping during any driving sections. I found this to be a challenging game, but not because its a bad game. Its just hard.

Graphically, its a quite simple 3D engine with some weird choices in regards to scale (pedestrians are as large as cars) in order for the models to be discernible. The sound suffers somewhat on DS but manages to make you feel you’re playing a GTA game. There’s a not great deal of dialogue, but there is some. No talk radio, of course and cutscenes are static images with text to move the story along. And the text is disarmingly funny and very biting in way I don’t remember Liberty City Stories was.

Chinatown wars plays well, is funny and is essential to any DS owner over 15 years of age. Handy for commuting or travelling.

Controller1.com rating 2/3

Now playing: GTA Chinatown Wars

I’m currently on holidays with the wife. To sate my gaming desires whilst on the road, I’ve bought my DS Phat with GTA Chinatown Wars and my PSP 1000 with God of War: Chains of Olympus. Of course, I can’t charge the PSP battery enough  so that CoD CoO can update the PSP’s firmware (one nice thing about the original DS and the Lite is that you don’t have to worry about this bullshit). So Chinatown Wars is the game du jour.

GTA:CW is Rockstar Leeds making a 3D GTA game from a top down perspective. Its got all the colour, edginess and humour of a full console version without the feeling that something is not quite right, as was the case with the two PSP iterations.

Your stylus is used appropriately, to manage your menu items, emails, GPS map, etc and the traditional dpad + buttons used for driving, moving and combat. This being a DS game, there has been an attempt to add stylus gameplay into the mix, such as using touch screen actions in minigames- such as hot wiring cars.

It works, mostly. Maybe its because I’m sill playing on the original DS, but I’ve found using the dpad to be somewhat painful after a short time. The game is still fun, but jeez it is hard. Its not easy to pin down why, but I found myself having to replay missions again and again.
Happily, the makers have taken one of many people’s criticisms of GTAIV to heart. If you fail a mission, you see the mission briefing (skippable, of course) and then you have the option to skip the travel to the missions by pressing select. Hallefuckinglujah!

So if you’re going to make your game hard, at least make retrying easier. Thanks Rockstar Leeds. Theeds.

Controller1.com Focus Test: There are still games on DS

We have a look at Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix and Peggle.

updated so missing audio file is present

 

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