Impressions: GTA: Chinatown Wars
Written by Mark Hill   
Thursday, 14 January 2010 00:04
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Yep, it's GTA.

Ok, that sounds bad, but it's really not. Altough Chinatown doesn't push the GTA franchise to any new or exciting heights (GTA4 pretty much put a lid on that), it does pack a lot of juice into a small box. There is a whole new collection of mini games, such as the educational drug dealing sessions that teach you everything you need to know about weed, meth, coke, and all those other things my D.A.R.E. teacher told me about. You can give tattoos for some cash, play scratch-off lottery tickets, and they've even made the GT part of the GTA harder by adding a hotwire minigame to car stealing. All that, and I'm only about two hours in.

As for the gameplay, it's solid but clunky at times, specifically when you are on foot, which is exacerbated by the presence of mutliple surrounding enemies. The target lock-on mechanic helps smooth things over, but sometimes the characters are just too small and fast, and the PSP's analog nub continues its mission of making life more difficult than it should be.

The player's PDA/Smartphone plays a large role in Chinatown Wars, as it hold all of the pertinent people, place, and thing to do info. Most importantly, though, it delivers your emails to you, so you no longer have to go find a computer. One of the more convenient aspects of the game is when you receive an email (usually informing you of someone that either wants to buy or sell some drugs at a good price), it gives you the option of setting your GPS to their location just by pressing X while reading the message. This takes all the guesswork and frustrating searches out of the equation, and really streamlines the game.

The driving is somewhat difficult to deal with, mainly because the cars move pretty fast, and you can't see very far ahead of yourself. This makes it very easy to accidentally slam into a police car and start that whole mess of a process, especially when you are mid-mish. Luckily, there is an included "Trip Skip" feature that lets you cut out the driving portion of missions on which you die over and over, taking at least a small part of the frustration out of having to replay them.

After spending time with Chinatown Wars, I feel that the GTA franchise may be better suited moving forward on handelds as opposed to consoles, especially since much of the content can be gracefully sized down to accomodate a DS or PSP without losing much of the intended fun. GTA on consoles plateaued with GTA4, but Chinatown Wars proves that there is still a big world explore in the palm of your hand.
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