Sharpen up your stylus, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is out on the Nintendo DS today, but we’ve already had an early play of the game. Is GTA Chinatown Wars worth any of your hard earned? Read on to find out our first impressions!
Let’s get this straight from the start. GTA: Chinatown is not like the handheld GTA games for the Sony PSP. Where as Vice City and Liberty City Stories emulate the style of GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas, GTA: Chinatown Wars stands alone.
If you have to draw parallels, the top down, slightly askew angle and unrealistic proportions recall the very first GTA game. It’s an apt comparison for another reason: GTA: Chinatown Wars is every bit as good as the original classic.
From the very start, it’s clear that Rockstar has played to the Nintendo DS’s strengths perfectly, creating a game that’s funny, violent and brilliantly addictive, without ever feeling like a port of another version.
As the name suggests, GTA: Chinatown Wars is set in the world of Liberty City’s Triads. You play Huang Lee, returning to the city following his father’s death, only to get sucked into the same underworld as his late pa. The premise is completely GTA: complete short, violent missions to progress the story, but that doesn’t make GTA: Chinatown Wars any less original.
With Huang now operating out of a Chinese restaurant and gang HQ, Sum Yung Gai (yes, Rockstar went there), we had the chance to play through several missions, and from what we played, Rockstar has completely nailed it.
Despite the limitations of the Nintendo DS cartridge and screens, Rockstar has created the same living, breathing world you know and love from GTA 4. Even the massive map is pretty much the same, minus Alderney island.
Pedestrians and traffic ebb and flow with the time of day and weather, talk to each other, even attack each other: while we were playing, a cop beat a passerby to a pulp, only for an ambulance to turn up and resuscitate him. And despite the lack of spoken word on DS (your cellphone is cleverly replaced with a PDA), there are still several radio stations belting out original and perfectly suited music.
The missions we played saw us wiping out an enemy hide out, carrying out an assassination from a rooftop with a sniper rifle and dropping molotov cocktails from a helicopter, and what struck us most was how well Rockstar has integrated GTA with the DS’s control system.
You move around on the top screen and check out the radar, PDA and menu on the touchscreen. You also use the touchscreen for two other things: firing certain weapons (you use the stylus to apply force and direction to grenades) and mini games.
Here’s the thing that struck us most: the mini games don’t feel gimmicky. Break into a parked car and you’ll have to hotwire it (there are several different ways to depending on the type of car). The sniping mission had us putting the rifle together piece by piece using the touchscreen to push and rotate the barrel, the butt and so forth.
And the drug dealing mini game? Just brilliant. We were expecting an illegal version of the wage negotiations from Theme Park, with crack instead of biscuits on the table, but it’s much more subtle. Drug resale prices depend on your location and proximity to CCTV cameras. The higher the risk, the more profit you can make, as we found out to our cost when a drug deal that seemed too good to be true turned out to be, and we were busted by undercover cops.
It’s little touches like this that mean GTA: Chinatown Wars has the potential to be not just a fantastic GTA game on a new platform, but one of the best Nintendo DS games of all time. We’re not just saying that because it’s an 18 rated DS game, but because it’s one of just a handful of games that truly take advantage of what the DS can do.
It’s a true game-changer, and mark our words: if you don’t already own a DS, it’s worth buying one for GTA: Chinatown Wars alone.
GTA: Chinatown Wars is out now, and we’ll be bringing you plenty more hidden features, tips and tricks so stay tuned.
