Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
Nintendo DS gets re-invented with a full-blown GTA episode that’s even smarter than it looks. DS the tough-guy’s handheld of choice? Reckon so!
We expect GTA on DS to be eating Nintendogs for breakfast when it arrives on 13 March. Chinatown Wars isn’t just good, as in if you already own a DS and desperate to play GTA well this’ll have to do. Instead Chinatown Wars is going to surprise you so hard you’ll find yourself rubbing your hands together with glee when you buy a DS just to play it. Were it not for the mature themes enacted hungrily with such comic brilliance on the dual screens, Chinatown Wars boasts inventiveness that you’d swear could only have come from Nintendo itself.
Superficial stuff first, because you can’t fail to notice how brilliant the game both looks and sounds. As protagonist Huang Lee heads from Hong Kong to Liberty City in the rousing intro, he is sketchily portrayed in a graphic novel style while some serious tunes are being pumped from the tiny DS speakers. There’s no speech used in the game, but superb digital samples are used to give the music a boost such as high-pitch wailing over intelligent drum and bass. Basically you’re not going to believe your eyes and ears.
In-game it only gets better as the graphic-novel aesthetic creeps into the animation, equal parts brutal and dark-humoured. If you run over a civilian in a vehicle they’ll go splat, but lay dead in a comic-book style posed like a crime-scene chalk outline. When Huang ferries a van load of crooks to bust a safe, they all pile in and out of the vehicle with exaggerated speed. Such antics alone keep you smiling.
But it’s the dialogue and characterisation that is so often the unsung champion of the GTA series, and scriptwriters Dan Houser and David Bland manage to inject such things as menace, desperation, and gung-ho heroism even into such a tiny stylised world. Doesn’t matter that the dialogue is succinct and typed out in the absence of voice-acting, if anything the wit is even sharper. You’ll immediately recognise Huang’s uncle Kenny as a severe taskmaster, or the no-good Triad understudy Chan Jaoming as a slouch. Because of this you buy into the drama with all its tongue-in-cheek panache.
As keenly as the scriptwriters and art team have combined to tell a terrific story, the game design is likewise inspired on DS. The touch-screen stuff isn’t just thrown in for the occasional novelty; it is sparingly introduced as a common-sense extension of the gameplay. If you’re tossing grenades or Molotov Cocktails, the direction, speed and arc of the trajectory is handled via the stylus within an on-screen target. Actually making your Molotov Cocktails involves carefully pouring gas into a bottle using the stylus too. You’ll piece together a sniper rifle, place and activate a safe-cracking device by turning the dial, toss coins into the toll gate and hot-wire cars via the DS touch screen. It’s GTA as you’ll have never played it before, but it feels perfect.
Golden GTA scenarios that include high-street shoot outs and cop-car chases are spiced-up too. In a fire fight the touch screen helps you quickly select your next weapon (and by the way some of the weapons, e.g. the chain gun, sound amazing). Driving is hilarious: you can perform burnouts and a special flame burnout to give you a turbo head start. Weaving between traffic is as much fun as it’s ever been, helped a little by steering that automatically centres along straights. If you’ve heat on your tail, the game demands that you take out a specified number of pursuit vehicles to reduce the chances of being caught. Shoot them to pieces or ram them off the road, whatever works but get it done. Again, flinging grenades… love it!
The mission format is also thoughtfully laid out for DS-style on-the-move gaming. Huang receives his instructions from briefcases placed at the location, which may also include tools related to the job, i.e. the sniper rifle mentioned earlier. Once a mission is complete Huang keeps a record of it on a magnetic board back at his apartment, which leads to a huge first for the GTA series overall: replay missions. Yep, the game keeps a record of Huang’s performance in such areas as speed and number of kills – similar, in a way to Achievements on Xbox 360. So if there’s a mission you especially like, you can go back and play it over and over again. The best part of all this is that your best efforts can be zapped directly via Wi-Fi to the Rockstar Games Social Club, and be made available for the world to see online.
One final neat touch, again leading the way for DS games across the board, is that the game auto-saves your current position when closing the DS. This means you can happily play on the bus or train and not worry about taking a break while you stagger toward the nearest Starbucks for another pick-me-up.
There’s a ton of other great gameplay features in Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars that we’ll save for the review – for example the cool tunes playing on the radio stations, how to deal with CCTV cameras (replacing the pigeons of GTAIV). But for now we’ll leave you with one last mind-boggling consideration, which is that everywhere in Liberty City apart from Algonquin is yours to explore in Chinatown Wars. All the familiar restaurants and bars, and you can guess what else, exactly where you expect to find them.
Whichever way you look at it, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is simply huge.
