Ah GTA. I don’t know exactly what to think about this series. GTA 1 and 2 were awesome, I had loads of fun with those. But they lost a bit of their charm once they went to 3D, but they still had a similar feel to them. Comically crime-ridden cities, weird characters, and overall good humor and solid enough gameplay. I wasn’t a big fan of the GTA3 “series”, but they were still okay games.

GTAIV removed all that IMO. It became way too serious, the gameplay was clunky and didn’t feel right(running around was a chore), and the physics which are somehow praised by everyone were laughable (realistic physics =/= getting shot 100 feet in the air after hitting a wall with a car). I felt that it kinda ruined everything that made GTA… well… GTA.

So my expectations for Chinatown Wars were very low, and I didn’t even feel like trying it out. But damn, I’m happy I did.

Read on for my impressions of the latest GTA game, and, at the moment of this posting, the highest-rated DS game.

Looks and sounds
The first thing you’ll see when you start playing is that the game re-uses the point of view from the original GTA games, a bird’s eye kinda view, from above the buildings. It’s a bit modified and i uses a sort off cel-shaded 3D graphic engine. The character models are super basic but since you always see them from far away it’s not too bad. The cars are okay too, nothing incredible. But overall the visual style works very well. It doesn’t look incredible, but it more than does the job.
The “cut-scenes” though look pretty cool. You see the characters from close-up in a comic-book style. There’s no animation or anything, but it does a good job at advancing the story and showing the characters to you.

The sounds are simplistic. The car and gunshots are standard fare.  There’s no voice acting, other than people screaming when you ram into them or get too close to them on the road, or a few other random voice clips. I also found none of the music to be very good. No, I don’t mind at all that all the music is MIDI, but none of t, in all the 5 radio stations, is very enjoyable. It does the job, but you won’t find yourself wanting a GTA:CW OST.

Story

You play as some guy from China who is going to work with his father, a member of the Triad in Liberty City, and you’re about to deliver a sacred sword to you uncle so that your family’s honor is kept and he can become the leader of the Triad. But during the deal your father is killed, the sword is taken and you are almost killed and left for dead in a sinking car in the river. The rest of the game you are pretty much trying to get revenge, while doing odd jobs for a few of the aspiring leaders of the Triad, to get some reputation in the Triad and to eventually help your uncle get the sword back and restore honor to your family.

Overall the story is quite enjoyable. Not overly good, but it carries the game well enough and it’s pretty interesting. The characters are pretty fun. The aspiring leaders all have good distinct personalities and are fun characters, and Huang Lee, who you’re controlling, is pretty damn funny (the kinda sarcastic bastard dude).

Gameplay
Basic gameplay
The basic gameplay is relatively simple. You run around, beat up people if you want to, steal vehicles, get chased by the police and do quests. The basic stuff is kinda fun to do, but the quests are really what carry the game.

The police is actually pretty fun here. Instead of the incredibly crappy "get out of their range" system from GTAIV, you have the option of staying away from the police (not spotted at all) for some time, or to smash police cars. Ramming into them hard enough or if they hit walls too hard, you get closer to have the police stopping to chase you. Depending on your wanted level, the police get more relentless. At level 1 they’re a bit useless and give up fast. At level 2 they try a lot hard to get you. At level 3 you’ll have loads of police on your ass and and helicopters will shoot at you. This goes on increasingly harder up to level 6 where tanks are after you (though I never passed level 3). And at any level, police just patrolling the street will also shoot at you.

The game also features a few mini-games. The most prominent is the car theft mini-game, which is done when you steal a parked car most of the time, and you must hotwire the car to get it to start(using the touch screen). Those are time based, and there’s a few of them. The tougher one(mostly because of the time limit) requires to get the same code on the car as the hacking machine and if you screw up you can’t take the car and have to start again. Of course the time it takes to hotwire cars is a bit too long when in a police chase, so it’s almost never an option in those cases. It’s just a lot easier to take a police car or a random car being driven on the streets.

Combat is pretty simplistic. You can lock on to a target (though if there’s many targets around it becomes an issue as to which target the game will choose). You have a basic one-two punch+kick attack, but you can pick up various weapons: grenades/molotovs (require use of the touch-screen, works pretty well), guns, swords, chainsaws, rocket launchers… There’s lots of variety. My big problem is the aiming. Even if you lock on, the weapon actually hitting the target is a bit random (or so it seems). But overall it works well enough.

The vehicle driving is pretty good. What’s nice is that every car controls a bit differently. Different top speed/acceleration, some different handling (some handling is rough, other can be overly slippery). There’s a lot of variety. And if you find a car you really like you can keep it in your garage and reuse it when you reload the game.

Side quests
There’s quite a lot of side-quests. The biggest one is drug-dealing. You occasionally get emails from people either selling drugs for ridiculously low prices, or  buying them for ridiculously high prices. You get a lot of those emails in-between missions, and it’s pretty interesting to try and make as much money as possible. You can also stash drugs in your apartment for future selling. The people buying/selling the drugs are all dealers, and when you check their stock you’ll see stats as to if you’ll actually be able to make good profit selling his stock if you decide to buy it. Overall the whole drug-dealing part is well done.

Other side-quests are randomly found on the streets. Some random mini-stories which are usually pretty funny. They can range from killing a bunch of prostitutes(hey, they’re the ones shooting at you), giving people a thrill by driving like crazy, following some people, driving people to other places in the city. There’s a lot of variety and you can do things you wouldn’t usually do in the main game which is pretty interesting.

There’s also some other side-quests to find, of course, like destroying cameras in the city to make drug dealers lower your price and a bunch of other random stuff.

OVERALL, the gameplay is great. There’s a ton of variety, the quests are fun, there’s some mini-games and the basic gameplay is plenty entertaining.

Overall
This is a very good game. For me, it’s a lot more fun than GTAIV. It goes back to the roots of the GTA franchise, the story is fun and wacky, there’s TONS of side quests and such, the drug-dealing mini-game, while not incredible, is a nice addition (and it can become quite addictive) and the main quests are pretty interesting and varied.
Solid gameplay, fun story, fun characters, this deserves most of the praise it’s getting and a great addition ot any DS owner’s collection.

jobocan Games, Handheld, Review