GameSpy: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (original) (raw)
Reviews
By Miguel Lopez | Mar 16, 2009
Chinatown Wars proves that the heart of the sandbox experience can thrive outside of big-budget blockbuster.
Outstanding!
Pros:
Vast scope in a small package; novel use of touchscreen.
Cons:
Writing is a cut below what we'd expect from GTA.
Can you miniaturize Grand Theft Auto? The question is moot -- it existed in miniature before GTA3 blew up the world with its mainstreaming of sandbox play. A more valid question is, can a GTA game on the DS, with all the attendant limitations and gimmicks, feel "real enough" to people like us today, people who just a few months ago were deep in GTA4? Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars says "yes." Simultaneously constrained and elevated by the limits of its platform, Chinatown Wars proves that the heart of the sandbox experience can thrive outside of a big-budget blockbuster. It also leads you to believe that it could teach its grand sibling a few tricks.
Grand Theft Auto IV actually tried to render a real-deal human drama amidst the distracting, undermining sandbox play. Chinatown Wars isn't even trying to go there. And really, I don't blame the writers. They just didn't have the tools to recreate their aberrant diorama on the DS, at least not in the form that we've become accustomed to. Think of how sound helped to texture GTA4's world, and lend it its sense of "place" -- the characters' voices, the radio stations, the pedestrian chatter. Think of the cut-scenes, with their body language and their stylized nuance that still somehow managed to achieve naturalism. In Chinatown Wars, this is all cooked down into still pictures and text. And while these narrative elements do look cool, if you peer into their soul, it's like seeing a funhouse reflection of GTA.
Protagonist Huang, the pampered son of a murdered gangster, traffics in snarky one-liners. The characters he meets -- ranging from a hopelessly incompetent Triad who's basically a composite of tuner culture and Asian popstar stereotypes, to a junkie cop with a hard-on for redemption -- are mainly receptacles for his dick and doodie jokes. While I don't doubt that these guys could be a Brucie-caliber riot if transported off the handheld, they're more or less defined by the limits of the format. In other words, they're there to make you chuckle on occasion, and dole out story missions.
In spite of all this, it's a little surprising to see how readily the act of playing GTA translates to the DS. Perhaps it shouldn't be; the series was born like this, so to speak, in a form that makes even Chinatown Wars' top-down, lo-fi 3D feel cutting-edge. From the moment I started playing, I was engaged in very much the same way I am when I play GTA4, scanning the map in search of available missions to push the completion percentage forward, in order to achieve, achieve, achieve. And GTA is no less an ass-kicker on the DS. What you do during missions hasn't changed, and the content is no less imaginative. You're still driving crazy, shooting people and burning things down. It's still aggravating if you fail and have to redo some parts, but in most cases you can immediately restart and skip the long drives. Mechanics are reworked for the format, which means driving is quite forgiving, shooting is typically fool-proof, and it's easier and more fun to ditch cops.