Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

We can’t say exactly why, but the release of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on PSP feels like something of a homecoming. Perhaps it’s just the last remnant of our once-automatic association of the GTA franchise with Sony machines, but, as good as it was, Chinatown Wars on the DS felt slightly surreal. The PSP just has a slightly more urban feel to it and while it’s still hard to believe that Rockstar was able to cram such a fully fledged, feature-packed and fun version of the GTA experience into any handheld, it’s arguably done even better on Sony’s more powerful portable machine.

The story is the same as that on the DS and you play as Huang Lee, the spoilt rich son of a recently assassinated crime lord, coming to Liberty City to bring a family heirloom – a sword – to his uncle Kenny, who is in turn looking to become a bigwig in the Liberty City Chinatown Triads. The sword is quickly stolen by a rival gang and Huang is swept up in the power struggles between his uncle and the other Triad gang lords looking to advance, going on the usual crazy GTA missions throughout Liberty City for each.

Told primarily through stylish hand-drawn stills, Huang’s story is the classic GTA narrative of a knowing protagonist surrounded by power-mad incompetents, and eerily similar to Niko’s situation in GTA IV. Just as in GTA IV, where your cell phone served as an interface for gameplay menus and means of character interaction and story progression, your PDA constantly receives emails and messages from important characters throughout the game to drive things to their inevitable bloody conclusion. While the story is much the same, there’s added content in the PSP version, and the way you control the action had to change for the PSP. The DS version was built around that handheld’s particular features – namely its touch screen, which formed the foundation for all its charming mini-games, so they’re back for the PSP version in slightly modified form.

When you hijack a car or attempt to disarm a bomb or do any other actions that would have previously used the touch screen, a screen-in-screen mini-game starts. It sees you, say, twisting the analogue nub to unscrew the ignition of a car before bringing the exposed wires together with the shoulder buttons, or pressing the O to cut the right wire on a bomb. While it isn’t as tactile as the DS implementation, it works satisfyingly well, and you still get a good sense of ‘doing’ the action in question, so it isn’t bad as compromises go. Graphically it has to be said that Chinatown Wars looks stunning on the PSP with both the frantic driving action and re-drawn cut-scenes getting a big boost from the extra juice afforded by the PSP. While the top-down presentation style of the game harks back to the classic GTA games, this is a far more sophisticated affair.

It’s actually fully modelled in 3D and the camera rotates 360 degrees, enabling you to see each and every side of all the cars and buildings as you move about the city. There’s just much more of a sense of a huge, living GTA-style city to roam through on PSP. What makes it all work so well is the variety of cars driving about, the people going about their business, and the way this shrunken Liberty City hums along. That’s helped in no small part by touches like a realistic day/night cycle with fully dynamic real-time lighting and the city’s weather patterns providing impressive rain and lightning. But it’s really everything you can do that makes the game. Missions are the usual gamut of fetch quests, assassination missions and chases, and thanks to a fantastic physics engine, vehicles handle with real weight and different types feel really distinct. It isn’t easy driving with the nub, but subtle driving assistance helps ease the pain. Only the on-foot missions let the game down, as the combat in Chinatown Wars is difficult to control properly, but shaky combat has always been a part of every GTA game.

One of the most arcade-like changes to the world of Grand Theft Auto is how you handle your Wanted level, and we have to admit it actually feels more fun. Rather than escaping an area to get off police radar, in true Smokey And The Bandit style you have to crash and ram police cruisers off the road at full speed to disable them.

It’s amazing how many ways Chinatown Wars feels like the rest of the GTA games, despite its scale. There’s an impressive number of things to do outside of missions, like stealing cop cars, fire trucks, cabs and ambulances for extra cash, or trading around the city as a drug dealer. It really is a fully stocked GTA sandbox; best of all, its bite-sized approach actually enables you to play it on the move. GTA: Chinatown Wars on PSP is bigger, looks better and arguably offers the definitive handheld GTA experience. If you’re a fan of the series, you won’t want to miss it.