Dom Robinson reviews

Distributed by
Take 2 Games

Price: £29.99 Players: 1 Vote and comment on this game: View Comments Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is the first ever GTA title on the Nintendo DS and it makes clever use of this console which sets it apart from the PSP releases. You play Huang Lee, whose uncle works for the Triads, and start off the first of the 55 missions to this title with your new girlfriend, Ling. You know how a GTA title works by now and the basic plot is that your uncle wants the family heirloom sword you've brought with you so he can give it away and become the bigshot in town. Clearly, you're unhappy with this as it'll go out of the family as a result. However, you've lost it so he can't have it, and he doesn't seem fussed that your Dad is dead which is how you came to acquire the sword in the first place. Rather than a full 3D experience, this one isn't quite 2D either. It shows the city top-down, but at an angle, so you can see the streets in a similar way to the original GTA games but with some element of 3D. Might sound a bit confusing, but you'll soon get used to it. It also has a more cartoony feel than the original GTA games, as everything has a distinct black outline to make it look cell-shaded. Random observations about this first DS release include: It makes good use of touchscreen, eg. at the start you end up in a car heading towards the bottom of the sea, so you have to tap the lower screen to break the glass and escape. This comes after some baddies think you're dead, especially as you've just been shot in the head and are bleeding. You also use it to select between weapons, fill molotov cocktail bottles and select emails to read, which are often notifications from characters within the game which is rather like getting pager messages in the GTA PS2 games. Note that it was a bit hit and miss to always throw molotovs in the right direction as I ended up firebombing myself a couple of times before I got the hang of it! It made me think that sometimes you can have too much interaction. That said, you'll get to burn down other shops with molotov cocktails to show them who's boss. You can also hail a taxi by whistling into the DS microphone. Drive-by shooting is done as an auto-target so you can do these with ease. You can buy new cars as you progress, but it's pointless as you can nick them any time. It's mainly an 18-cert game because you carry out drug-dealing operations. The actual violence is fairly tame by today's standards and the strong language isn't as frequest as in the more recent games. If you fail a mission then you get the option of pressing Select to redo it. You'll get more weapons for completing missions You can drive boats, and motorbikes are very fast to drive. You can recruit new triads by killing all the hoodlums shooting at them in the streets - oh, the irony as you drive over to help them, yet run over several innocents on the way :) There's also the usual stuff such as getting wanted stars from police and then running away from them to remove those, or go to a pay 'n' spray, and you can also carry out taxi fare missions. Overall, this is essentially like the old GTA style but for today's handheld. It's a good piece of entertainment, but for me the way forward is more games on the PSP, as it would be in 3D and could've been just like the more modern GTA titles.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2009.