Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars [DS]

22 Mar 2009 at 13:31:00 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (DS)

The GTA series has had a bit of a bumpy ride when it comes to the Nintendo systems. Up until GTA4, Sony pretty much ruled the roost for this particular franchise, with the PC and Xbox generally getting ports a lot later. The main Nintendo consoles were skipped, while the handheld systems got few, generally less than satisfactory, entries. It hasn’t always been this way, with the first few Grand Theft Auto games being top-down and developed primarily for the PC.

Chinatown Wars, despite feeling at times like a throwback to the early PC entries, is a DS game through and through, and it shines because of it.

The protagonist, Huang Lee, is a spoiled rich kid who just happens to be the son of a Hong Kong Triad leader. When his father is assassinated, Huang is tasked with delivering the family’s heirloom sword (won by his father in a card game a few years back) to the new family head in Liberty City. Sadly, this doesn’t go to plan and before the opening cutscene is over, the sword has been stolen, Huang has a gunshot wound in his head, and his body has been dumped into the river. The majority of the game revolves around trying to find both the sword and the assassins, while working for a variety of colourful characters in Liberty City - most of whom are competing for favour in the Triads.

And those characters really are colourful. With the technical limitations of the DS, full speech clearly wasn’t an option for the cutscenes and characters, so the scriptwriters clearly worked overtime to make the dialogue as impressive as possible. Chinatown Wars is a departure from the rather more grim GTA4, focusing instead on a cast of psychotic morons who’re generally played for laughs, and are indeed very, very funny. From a deeply sarcastic junkie cop with an occasional love for whiny introspection, to the idiot son of the current Triad leader with no grasp of sarcasm or irony, these characters are genuinely hilarious. Huang himself is extremely amiable, starting off as fairly eager to please but quickly getting fed up with the people who want him to do favours for them, and from that point on most mission briefings are punctuated with cynical one-liners that the other characters tend to miss.

The best characters in the world can’t make a good game, of course, and I’m happy to report that Chinatown Wars IS a good game. Rather than attempting to recreate one of the console games on a hand-held system, as with the PSP’s Stories games, Chinatown Wars harks back to the top-down entries in the series, but with the experience and style that’s come with years of developing the GTA3 series.

Everything works much as you’d expect, albeit from a top-down perspective. Cars can be stolen and driven at the tap of a button, you lock onto your target before taking them down, and mass-murder quickly brings the police to you. What’s slightly more impressive is the amount of touch-screen functionality, and even more impressive is how much of it is enjoyable. The top screen is the game screen, giving you your view of the city, while the lower screen takes the form of Huang’s PDA, complete with emails (taking the place of GTA4’s phone) and GPS. If you want to change weapon, you tap the icon on the bottom screen, and the action pauses while you choose what you want. If you want to set a waypoint, then tap into your GPS, and double-tap onto your destination. It’s simple, intuitive, and effective.

Touch-screen minigames are also fairly common in Chinatown Wars, but they’re short and entertaining, and normally take the form of something you wouldn’t have control of in the main series. If you steal a parked car, there’s a good chance you’ll have to hotwire it, either by unscrewing a panel and connecting wires, or turning a screwdriver in the ignition, or entering an immobiliser code. Putting a bomb into a car requires you to attach the device yourself. This comes to a head in the seemingly-obligatory mission where you have to steal a car, take it to a garage, and then take it back before anyone notices, as getting it to the garage actually lets you smash it in yourself. While it may just be tapping on a touch-screen, thumping in the engine with a hammer felt cathartic.

Slightly more annoyingly is that thrown weapons are relegated to the touch-screen. Grenades have always caused a bit of trouble for the series, and Chinatown Wars seeks to rectify this by asking you to hold your stylus onto the icon on the bottom screen, and essentially set distance with that, and then release. It’s a system that works well, and grenades are certainly less fiddly to aim than they used to be, but doing something hurriedly on a touch-screen means you’ve got to take one hand off the other controls – which you’ll still need, particularly if you’re in a car. It’s a nice idea, but not one without problems.

Missions themselves are compacted to a portable length, with the majority taking around five to ten minutes, and they’re nicely varied. There are the usual ones involving stealing a car and killing someone, or picking something up and then driving back without getting killed, but there are plenty of more varied ones that make use of the touch-screen functionality, such as one involving finding sunken crates using sonar. As with the aforementioned garage mission, even the missions you expect tend to be mixed up a little bit, and it helps them feel fresh.

Probably the biggest change, though, is the drug dealing. You can buy or sell at any of the dealers in Liberty City in a manner akin to the old Drugwars game - but with the aid of dealers sending you emails to let you know when they’re selling cheap or buying high. Of course, these are occasionally broken up by cops raiding your deals and necessitating a speedy getaway.

The police mechanic has changed a little, too. Much as before, to escape police attention you either respray your car, or lay low for awhile, but with a twist. Making cop cars crash lowers your star rating. If you have a four star rating, then causing four cop cars to crash will drop you to three stars, and so on. This lends a different feel to the police chases, and it’s extremely welcome.

As ever, though, there are problems. Happily, none of them are particularly technical in nature; the framerate is consistently high and everything looks good. The lack of mid-mission checkpointing is a real pain, though. There are concessions, letting you skip initial drives on replays, but it’s little consolation on the longer or more difficult missions.

The other major problem is the viewpoint. The camera is quite close-in, and unlike the early GTA games, it doesn’t zoom out to the size you really need when travelling at high speeds in a Banshee. It’s not bad enough that you’ll crash every time you hop in one, but it will cause you more problems than it really should.

Chinatown Wars doesn’t really do much new, but it does everything old with such style that it feels fresh. This is GTA, with all the sex, drugs, and violence, only on a DS, and it’s a highly recommended purchase. Just don’t expect GTA5.

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