Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars AU Review - IGN (original) (raw)

Every Grand Theft Auto has two common elements that make up the whole: formula and agenda. By their genre-defining nature, each title has, since the PlayStation era, adhered to a structure that holds fewer and fewer surprises - and this has allowed Rockstar to refine these games and their fundamental mechanics into something wonderful and even extraordinary. The 'agenda', on the other hand, can be viewed as the heart of the tale, surmising your motivations and giving each instalment a unique flavour or angle – usually in the form of the main character, his background and motivation.
Essentially, formula keeps players' expectations in line, while the agenda ideally makes the experience irresistibly compelling.

To this end, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars' aspirations are a little more transparent than prior titles, sporting its roots on its sleeve – or more literally, on its cover. It's an engrossing adventure that achieves a lot – mostly within the formula the series has become synonymous with, while this time focussing on Liberty City's Chinese Triads for flavour. This time, however, the Nintendo DS has allowed Rockstar Leeds' large scale production team to experiment a little bit with touch screen mechanics and a user interface that needs to be adopted by the mainline series in the future.

Huang Lee, the lead character in Chinatown Wars, barely steps off the plane in Liberty City before becoming entangled in something much larger than he anticipated. A sacred family sword, the 'Yu Jian', is taken from his possession and his late father's name is slandered by conniving relatives and ladder-climbing sociopaths. Now Lee is out to recover the blade and seek vengeance for the murder of his old man and make his way out the other end in one piece, while spilling some blood and chainsawing some fools along the way – you know, for good measure. Huang isn't alone in Liberty City; your uncle Wu 'Kenny' Lee is your first point of contact, and his early missions both teach you the gameplay ropes as well as open a few doors while rubbing your nose in the underworld dirt.

Your first drive through Liberty City, which mirrors the layout of GTAIV's landscape, minus Alderney, is a somewhat jarring experience. The perspective has reverted back to the classic quasi-overhead view of the famed PSOne titles, the camera now mostly fixed behind your car, though it automatically rotates if you do a U-turn – and you can quickly pull the camera back in line by tapping the Left shoulder button. The D-pad controls your character's movement, as well as car steering, eschewing any touch-screen analogue silliness. Aiming lock-on is assigned to the Right shoulder button, while the face buttons variously allow you to sprint, leap or roll, and if unarmed, perform some basic kung fu – because hey, no Asian ethnic video game commentary is complete without a flying kick move, right? Right. As it stands, it's great to see Leeds ensure that your character can still leap over smaller walls and objects, while keeping the lock-on mostly intelligent and intuitive enough to select your nearest threat, rather than cars or pedestrians in the vicinity.

Those missing the over-the-top action of older GTA games will find Chinatown Wars returns to its roots. We like.

Once you kick into a mission, any doubts about how the series might translate to the DS will go out the window; this is vanilla Grand Theft Auto all the way – perhaps even more entertaining in some respects than GTAIV. In addition to your basic smash and grabs, kill-sprees and to-ing and fro-ing, the DS' touch screen pulls you a little deeper into the experience –almost all of the touch-screen activities are really well thought out and integrated into the gameplay as not to distract or, worse, irritate.

Throughout the course of the adventure, you'll hotwire cars, make Molotov cocktails, disarm explosives, defibrillate a body, assemble weapons, break windshields, wrap and pull an engine starter cable, scratch lottery tickets, rifle through trashcans – and a few other clever uses that we'll save for you to discover. Largely, these don't actually add a whole lot to the experience – they're superficial micro-games that kind of flesh out the gameplay and break up the routine. However, the interface, menu system and the mock-PDA operating system are where the touch-screen shines.

Chinatown Wars' user interface should be a point of pride for Rockstar Leeds; it takes the fundamentals of GTAIV's GPS system, which illustrates a legal route from waypoint to waypoint – but allows players, by way of the options menu, to integrate GPS arrows onto the street surface and compass waypoints that shift dynamically around the edge of the screen. Brilliant. This keeps your eyes on the top screen at all times, rather than having to constantly shift your gaze to the lower screen in order to keep track of your direction. It's outstanding for quick-fire missions where you really just want to get from point to point without having to fight with the map for directions.

The email system keeps track of your missions, while fleshing out the story, since cutscenes and exchanges are brief and somewhat bland. Hop into an email (a handy and discrete icon pops up whenever you have fresh mail), read the brief and tap a 'link' to set your GPS waypoint and off you go. It's streamlined and intelligent – perfect for DS players after quick gameplay. Your PDA also offers direct access to weapons sales; Ammunation continues to be the purveyor of fine firearms – but at high prices. That's no problem though, as GTA: Chinatown Wars gives players plenty of ways to make moolah.

The perspective only really shifts during Unique Stunt Jumps or as you transition between action and cutscene.

The drug trafficking trade is alive and kicking in Liberty City, and you can get your cut of the pie for some easy cash. The system hinges on a simple supply and demand system where certain regions and factions want specific drugs, while others don't –but are willing to sell other narcotics at better prices instead. With your PDA, you can receive updates on who's buying, who's selling and a great market overview and daily snapshot that tracks profit and loss. Really though, once you've started doing the legwork and dealing in the most valuable commodities – cocaine and heroin – it's pretty much impossible to go wrong. You can also start raiding drug dens midway through the game, and there are smuggling runs that can be disrupted for a little extra smack on the side.

The drug culture is, like most elements in Chinatown Wars, well thought out and easy to get into. The city itself makes finding a secluded dealer akin to stumbling on a treasure chest in an adventure game of the strictest sense – except these suckers constantly refill their coffers, and there's the not-so-small risk that the fella carting around 20 bags of cocaine might be an undercover narc, ready to bring down the full force of the law upon your head.

Missions routinely end in bloodbaths, but more off-beat assignments will take you into the seas and air.

Liberty City looks incredibly impressive on DS; the system has modest 3D abilities, but the textural detail and creative use of lighting and cel-shading effects give the environment an ornate and gritty feel. We were actually taken aback by the care applied to the cityscape's lesser details; the engine pumps out a convincing day/night cycle that shifts shadows cast by buildings and key geometry across the ground, for instance. Telephone cables and power lines criss-cross the streets and lanes, 2D pedestrians bustle around, getting in fist fights, enter buildings, read newspapers, bring out umbrellas and interact with each other in a convincing manner. The cars handle with a decent sense of physics and weight too – something you'll appreciate when you start hitting jump ramps and flying through billboards, triggering a Unique Stunt Jump and flashy slow motion camera rotation to boot. Even the trees stand as about the best we've seen on the DS – and sheesh, if that's not a claim to fame, we don't know what is.

Really, though, would gamers have balked if the car headlights didn't become damaged, or the doors and hood didn't fly off after serious abuse? Maybe these kinds of details are overkill, but given this is a handheld with clear rendering limitations, this level of effort and detail is astounding and should be recognised as such. We did encounter a little bit of slowdown during a high-speed chase through parkland, where cars were exploding left and right and there was a lot of detail on screen, but during the general course of your average mission, you won't complain. The DS has its limits and Chinatown Wars occasionally rubs up against the barrier.

The quality sadly doesn't quite extend to the bland cutscenes, however. Unlike the PSP Grand Theft Auto 'Stories' titles, cinematics in Chinatown Wars are presented in still (or very minimally animated) frames of illustration, accompanied by lines of dialogue below. The 3D in-game engine is reserved for the core gameplay, while Safe Houses are also a single frame of touch-screen enabled objects. The decision to split the game into portions of illustrated content and 3D cityscape is a little bit divisive; clearly rendering capabilities on the DS prevented the team from creating sophisticated 3D character models for mission introductions, but the result is characterisation that feels at times detached. Almost all of the emotion needs to be conveyed through the dialogue, which is assuredly solid – even if humour is a little hit-and-miss at times – but there just isn't enough personality in these sequences, and it lowers the overall impact of the presentation a little bit.

AI in Grand Theft Auto Chinatown is a little sketchy at times. Hop into a cab (whistle or blow into the microphone or hold down X), select a random location and just watch what happens. We're not sure who was responsible for Quality Assuring this segment of the game, but something's broken in there. Numerous cabs took us on strange tours of brick walls, centre dividers, lawns, parks and the same street over and over and over again in a futile attempt to get us to our destination. Sometimes, just standing there watching traffic would result in the weirdest driver behaviour; cars got stuck in alleyways or repeatedly reversed into buildings, trees and fences. It got so bad that it was actually funny – almost like a small child left to run headlong into a wall only to fall over and then get back up – and do it again and again. Hey – at least you can skip the cab ride entirely – but watch out for those errant drivers. They'll getcha.

The game also errs on the easy side of the difficulty spectrum. Now, that's totally fine on one hand; nobody likes replaying the same mission ten times in a row (though, the newly implemented Mission Replay board in your safe house now allows you to do just that – and compete on leader boards via the Rockstar Social Club), but the game only occasionally presents any serious challenge. Time limits are mostly generous, heath and weapon drops are frequent and enemy gunfire falls short or misses the mark if you're a screen-length away. This isn't a negative point, per se – it's just a point. The game sports punctuated moments of violence and keeps the travel time between objectives noticeably smaller – which is perfect for stop-start handheld gamers who want to complete a 5 minute mission on the bus.

The sound is probably the weakest element of a strong hand; the world sounds great, but you'll miss the voice acting, the licensed tunes and the quality. The DS does a good job of emulating the white noise bustle of traffic and pedestrian banter, but even a few low-quality licensed tunes to bop to would've been amazing. Again, not a biggie – the original tracks are great – but a small sticking point.

Yes, you can still drive a tank. No, you cannot attempt to invade Paris, 'Spaced' style.

The depth and breadth is still here, and that's arguably Rockstar Leeds' greatest achievement. Chinatown wars retains a diverse offering of sub-games – delivery missions, street racing, ambulance service, deep drug trafficking, taxi fare collecting – and it doesn't do it at the expense of game length, either. You're still looking at 30 hours for the main storyline and most of the side missions. That's damned impressive. It also throws in a mildly entertaining co-op and head-to-head multiplayer (limited to 2 players). In it, you'll find your standard deathmatching mode, 'Survivor', as well as a co-operative base-defence mode, street racing and the option to exchange drugs and stats. If your buddy has a copy of the game, you'll find these to be a fun distraction.

Verdict

Outside of the story, the tone of the action in the game is noticeably lighter and more enjoyable than Grand Theft Auto IV. While IV strove for realism and authenticity as much as style, Chinatown actually returns to its roots, raising eyebrows and broadening smiles with chain guns, rocket launchers, tasers, flashbangs and dozens of other tools of mischief and chaos. There are some quirky incidental characters to stumble upon, a little bit of eye candy, a whole lot of nose candy and that magical something –production values, perhaps – that cement this iteration as one of the DS' best.

As always, there's a lot more to a Grand Theft Auto game than a review can really convey. Players who are well-versed in the formula that underpins the series are in for a few cool twists, but largely the process remains unchanged – and the tone actually improved and lightened. For Nintendo-only gamers out there – and these days, there are more of you than ever – this is an authentic Grand Theft Auto experience. It isn't watered down; it's as fun and foul-mouthed as any series-proper instalment. While not perfect, it'll suck you in and keep you up at night like a chronic addiction. Hook it to our veins.