GTA: Chinatown Wars

[MinisterofDOOM]

Time for my review of this one. I bit the bullet and bought it. And while it's not as bad as I feared, neither is it as good as I hoped. It has a few major issues that keep it from reaching it's full potential. Still, it's much better than some of the other recent GTA offerings like The Lost and the Damned and certainly better than the last portable GTA (Vice City Stories) and superior to the last Nintendo portable GTA (GTA Advance).

The game looks okay. I'm still wondering if I've been playing the same game as the reviewers whose praises I've read so frequently. It's okay at best. The stylization is nothing special, the resolution is crappy and the detail just barely adequate. I can recognize cars from the "big" versions of the games but just barely. People are misproportioned blobs just like they were in GTA2. The cutscene art is passable at best and certainly not interesting or particularly well-done in my eyes.

The game controls well (with a few exceptions where the touch screen comes into play) and it's odd (but nice) getting used to the classic PS2 control layout on a Nintendo system, where habits leave you pressing the wrong buttons for "confirm" and "cancel" and you have to remind yourself you're still playing GTA, even if it is on the DS. The old road-following feature returns from the first two titles and makes driving more more manageable with the DS's sloppy-feeling D-pad (please let the DSi fix this!). But at high speed you'll still find yourself bouncing between lanes of traffic. Fortunately, R* Leeds planned for this and even police cars will tolerate a small amount of accidental bumping before deciding to help you out of the car and into a jail cell.Most of the "average" size/mass cars seem a bit too fragile to me, though. And all the cars seem a little too susceptible to gunfire. It's nice when you're on the trigger end of an exploding car, but when a couple of shotgun blasts reduce your careful work to ruins, it's a little frustrating.

The game has some great new passtimes as well as old returning ones. The best, though, is the drug trading system. It's like the classic game drug wars, except in GTA. You have a lockbox at your safehouse where you can secure your supplies or you can carry them on you (and risk having them confiscated if you get busted). Prices rise and fall and you can take some control of the pricing by taking out (or not) security cameras near dealers, thereby affecting their willingness to deal and the prices they deal with.You can also hijack a variety of supply trucks (guns, drugs, etc.) and take them back to your hideout (if you can survive the angry pursuit of the vehicle's former owner) to steal the contraband for sale (the LCPD now pays cash for weapons you don't want, no questions asked).

The Missions are okay and certainly enjoyable, but are completely standard GTA fare. Some of the cutscenes seem needlessly long, adding nothing of value through the ramblings of characters you don't particularly care about. There's not a lot of emotion or expression of any kind, really, except anger, in any of the dialog. It's just there to tell you why you're doing what you're doing. It does it's job but leaves you wondering what happened to the brilliance seen in Vice City.

The game's biggest weakspots is also one of it's neatest features. The PDA is a sleek way of integrating the game functions using the touch screen. The problems with it are that it takes time to switch between functions (tapping the minimap brings up a full map, but only after a 1 or 2 second loading screen...isn't this a CARTRIDGE-based game?!) which really gets in the way of the flow of the game. Also, the minimap AND full map are both ENTIRELY inadequate and NOT ZOOMABLE.(?!) The minimap is far too zoomed in and the "full" map is basically a pannable version of the minimap with a fully-zoomed-out map on the top screen for reference. The amount of detail on the maps is laughable and they're essentially useless for anything more than inputting GPS locations. Worse, the zoom levels never really let you get a grasp for the layout of the city, so you remain pretty dependent on GPS throughout the game.Since this game takes place from an overhead view, your forward visibility is highly restricted. You can overlay the GPS route onto the actual road you're driving on, but it doesn't give any forwarning. And the crappy minimap's lack of detail makes judging scale, distance, and speed difficult and only looks a short way beyond what your overhead cam sees anyway. So you're basically driving blind, which is frustrating when you're trying to pull off a jump or some other precise maneuver.

The touch screen's ultimate failure, though, is in it's use as the projectile button. Grenades, molotovs, etc. are tossed by dragging the stylus (or your finger) from their icon on the touch screen outward and letting go. The further you drag, the further you throw. But it doesn't work very well and the feedback is nonexistent, so it's a guessing game that often ends wrong. Firefighter side-missions force you to use the same touch interface to use the truck's water hose (even though normal drivebys in cars utilize a pretty decent autotargetting system which would work better). But you can't steer, run the throttle, AND use the touch screen at once unless you're a Vortigaunt and have 3 hands so it just gets tedious in a hurry.

And speaking of the fire truck missions, I spent the first 4 missions rushing in a straight line ALL THE WAY across an island, back and forth, for MINUTES of straight-line driving to put out a few fires, then turn around and do it again. BORING. Worse than boring, it's just not fun.

Motorcycles drive well and have a certain amount of "bail buffer" to account for the challenge of driving with the overhead view (something the first GTA could have used) and handling (cars and bikes) is predictable and varied between vehicles. The new wanted system (destroy cop cars to lose stars) sounds great in theory but in practice in the game environment is not all that great in execution or function. Still, the old lay low and wait from GTA4 hasn't gone away, so now you simply have more options.

So, in the end, it's a fun GTA that is probably best (like most GTA titles) played as a free-form relaxation tool and less for it's story missions.

I was disappointed that it didn't feel more like the original GTA titles that it visually echoes with it's viewpoint. I owned the first GTA before the franchise caught on, and loved it. But this really plays more like GTAIII with a different camera. Which isn't bad, it just isn't what I was expecting.

[captainfalco]

I have about 40 mins to an hour into the game and overall its pretty good.

I was wondering if anyone else was having a hard time navigating the city without the map too. The missions seem standard gta, and I haven't gotten to any of the minigames yet, but I'm looking forward to them now.

My guess is that this is one of the best titles in the genre for the ds, but I wouldn't base the purchase of a ds on a game like this at all, and instead save your money for a console.