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DVDfever.co.uk – Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Sony PSP review Dom Robinson reviews
Take 2 Games
- Price: £29.99
- Players: 1
- Widescreen: Yes
- Vote and comment on this game: View Comments
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is the third GTA title on the Sony PSP, having been ported across from the Nintendo DS, and while that version made clever use of the console which set it apart from the PSP releases, the PSP version is also a success.
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 title include:
- Whereas the DS version made good use of touchscreen, this works just as well but in other ways – for example, at the start you end up in a car heading towards the bottom of the sea, so you had to tap the lower screen to break the glass and escape, whereas here you tap the shoulder buttons to achieve the same thing. It doesn’t take away any enjoyment from the game, unless you’re a must for touching a screen whereas I’m quite happy just pressing buttons. Similarly, I’m quite happy using a joypad for any game, rather than throwing myself about the room, Wii-style.
Anyway, this sequence comes after some baddies think you’re dead, especially as you’ve just been shot in the head and are bleeding. Whereas the touchscreen would be used to tap 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 – here it’s more straight forward with standard button-pressing and turning round the joystick to undo screws with a view to hotwiring a car.
In fact, on the DS, 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. Either way, though, you’ll get to burn down other shops with molotov cocktails to show them who’s boss which is always good fun.
- Obviously, you can’t hail a taxi by whistling into the microphone here, but I never bothered anyway, I just nick ’em!
- 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 andthe 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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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.