Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
| Game Name: | Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars |
| Platforms: | PSP |
| Publisher(s): | Rockstar Games |
| Developer(s): | Rockstar Leeds |
| Genre(s): | Modern Action Adventure |
| Release Date: | October 20, 2009 |
| ESRB Rating: | M |
Grand Theft Auto made its first appearance on the Nintendo DS with Chinatown Wars. The game had quite a positive reception and Rockstar decided to port it on to the PSP, which already had experiences with other GTA series like the Vice City Stories and the Liberty City Stories. Just how will a port from console with touch style controls and 2 screens work on a console with a single non-touch screen. The answer it is a terrific fit.
Story
Huang Lee the Protagonist
The story Chinatown Wars is pretty lame but hey it is portable version and is just made to kill some time. Chinatown Wars tells the story of a power struggle within the Triad gangs from the perspective of Huang Lee, whose crime-boss father has recently been murdered. Huang flies to Liberty from Hong Kong to avenge his father, and predictably becomes embroiled in the war between those hoping to step into the dead man’s shoes.As Huang, you advance the story–which should take you about nine hours to play through–by undertaking missions for a number of different characters within the Triad organization, as well as for one or two people outside of it. Many of these missions involve the usual mix of driving fast, killing people, and not getting caught by the cops, but there are plenty of varied and memorable missions as well.
Traditionally, getting away from the police in a GTA game has involved outrunning them, finding a secluded spot to lay low, or ducking into a Pay ‘n Spray auto shop to give your car a makeover. You could fight the police if you really wanted to, but your aggression would generally just anger them more. It just makes the game ten times fun.
Design
The game does not follow a third-person perspective as in other GTA’s found on the PSP but the old 2-D style along with the mix of a little 3-D angles like jumping a stunt ramp with a car. The games graphics also follows a little comic style cell-shaded graphics than the regular polygonal graphics. In Chinatown Wars, you have an additional option that turns the old system on its head to some degree, and the resulting car chases are better than those in any previous game as a result. The new system is simple but immensely satisfying; if you have a three-star wanted rating, destroying three cop cars will knock it down to a two-star rating, and so on. You can destroy the cop cars either by crashing into them at great speed or by racing around and narrowly missing environmental obstacles in the hope that they’ll make a mistake and crash themselves. The key thing to remember is that you have to destroy the cop cars without actually killing the cops inside, so stepping out of your vehicle with a rocket launcher isn’t the way to play on this occasion.
The in-game camera does a superb job of following you around for the most part, and you can reposition it behind you at any time with a quick (if slightly awkward) tap of the D pad, but it seems unavoidable that your view will still be obscured from time to time. There are a lot of tall buildings in some neighborhoods that get in the way when the camera is slow to reposition itself, and good luck if you’re involved in a gunfight while surrounded by trees–you won’t be able to see much of anything. The verticality of Liberty City’s architecture adds to its already impressive sense of scale, but occasionally it gets in the way of the gameplay.
No more third person perspective, following the old GTA.
Gameplay
On the subject of gameplay, taking advantage of the local multiplayer support for two people in Chinatown Wars is arguably even more fun than playing through the story. Support for more players or via Wi-Fi would be welcome, of course, but there’s a great selection of modes here that are a blast in spite of the low player count. There are races that almost always involve you destroying one another’s vehicles or ditching them when you find a faster vehicle, especially if you opt for the Death Race variant and set the default vehicles as tanks. There’s a Stash Dash mode in which you rush across the city and fight for the controls of a delivery van, after which you attempt to make deliveries while your opponent does anything they can to stop you. And there’s a surprisingly fun one-on-one deathmatch mode called Liberty City Survivor that’s action-packed from start to finish because police are watching your every move and are quick to join the fray the moment you give them an excuse to. Defend the Base mode challenges you to work together and prevent a number of targets that are coming under fire from being destroyed for a period of time, and Gang Bang is an objective-based game in which you’re each accompanied by a number of henchmen and take turns to attack and defend your respective assets. Gang Bang games can take a long time because the winner not only needs to destroy a series of objectives, but must also plant a bomb that takes several seconds–an eternity when you’re unable to defend yourself–to arm. Noticeable lag affects all of these modes intermittently, but it’s rarely so severe that it’s detrimental to gameplay.
Sniper Rifle is not a weapon that you can carry and is available only in specific missions.
When you’re not carrying out missions handed to you by central characters and by random pedestrians that you encounter, there are an impressive number of other things to do in Liberty City, some old, some new. For example, stealing a cop car, an ambulance, a cab, a fire truck, or a noodle delivery van will give you the option to make some money impersonating those vehicles’ rightful owners. And if you successfully steal a delivery van that’s being used to transport drugs or weapons and get it back to one of your secluded safe houses, you get to keep its contents. Weapons can be tricky to obtain this way because the Ammu-Nation drivers are invariably well armed. But stealing drugs is far less challenging, and if you get them for free then making a profit is inevitable when you meet with any of the 80 dealers who, once you find them, can be traded with to make relatively easy money. That’s provided that there are no police in the immediate vicinity, because they’ll either spook the dealer before you can make the deal or wait for you to close it and then move in to make arrests. Interacting with a dealer in any way adds him to your GPS system’s database for future reference, so anytime you see a telltale blue dot on your map, it’s well worth a quick detour to check it out.
Buy menu's are pretty primitive but it does the job.
In addition to local multiplayer support, Chinatown Wars offers Wi-Fi functionality that doesn’t involve head-to-head gameplay but is still pretty neat in its own right. After exchanging details with other players, you can send messages to each other in-game, trade weapons or other items, and even exchange GPS locations that you’ve marked as favorites. If you connect to the Rockstar Social Club, you can also upload your in-game stats to the site’s leaderboards and unlock a couple of action-packed bonus missions to play after you’ve beaten the main story. Minigames on the Social Club Web site can also be played to earn money and prizes that become available to you in-game the next time you sync your high scores.
Incidentally, weapons are in plentiful supply and can be ordered from Ammu-Nation’s Web site using your occasionally sluggish in-game PDA. There are more than 20 different weapons to play with in Chinatown Wars, including everything from fists, flashbangs, and flamethrowers to swords, shotguns, and sniper rifles. Most weapons fall into either the ranged, melee, or thrown classes as far as controls go, and all perform their jobs admirably. The sniper rifle is unique in that it comes into play only in specific missions, must be assembled via a simple minigame before use, and turns the entire screen into a crosshair. Proximity mines that you drop at your feet are also a fun addition to the GTA arsenal, though they remain armed for only a few seconds before they explode without provocation. The most powerful weapons become readily available only toward the end of the game, which is just as well because as soon as you get your hands on a flamethrower or an armful of flashbangs, they make subsequent missions much easier.
Stunt jumps will give you nice angles to check out that nice view.
Presentation
It’s hard to imagine anyone with even passing interest in Chinatown Wars not having a great time with it, but what’s even more impressive than the open-world gameplay is the quality of its presentation. Seeing GTAIV’s Liberty City on the PSP might not have the same “Wow!” factor that seeing it on the DS earlier this year did, but even the texture pop-in that’s occasionally noticeable when driving at high speed is easy to overlook when every inch of your surroundings looks this great. Cutscenes are impressive in a different way; they’re not animated, and it’s disappointing that none of the characters are voiced, but the quality of the stylized illustrations is uniformly high, and the series’ dark and self-referential humor is evident in practically every line of conversation.
Steal a parked car to engage in Checkpoint Races
Other than lacking any voice work for key characters, the audio in Chinatown Wars does very little wrong. Eleven radio stations (including the DS game’s original five) offer instrumental rock, metal, electronic, dance-punk, dub, hip-hop, house, and jazz tracks that either complement or serve as perfect counterpoints to the action depending on which you listen to. Furthermore, every item in the city has a believable sound effect associated with it, whether it be the shattering of glass when you destroy a bus stop, the squelch of a pedestrian becoming a roadkill statistic, the satisfying spin of a minigun, or something as mundane as the thud of a traffic cone being displaced.
Conclusion
With its handful of extra story missions, significantly improved audio and visuals, and mostly superior control scheme, the PSP version of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is even better than the DS original. It’s also better than either of the other Grand Theft Auto games for the PSP (Liberty City Stories, Vice City Stories), and unlike those games, in no way does it feel like a scaled-down handheld version of a proper GTA game. Don’t let the art style or the presence of simple minigames fool you: Chinatown Wars is every bit as deserving of its mature rating as previous games. It’s also one of the best GTA games yet.
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