1. Chinatown Wars borrows the top-down perspective from the first two GTA games but its closest cousin is GTA III and you get all the freedom and mayhem you could ask for from the series.
2. This was not some handheld cash grab either. Lots of big developers farm out their handheld versions of big franchises to third parties and the end result is frequently half-ass. Rockstar put considerable effort into making this a complete GTA game. Case in point: the theme song is a full-on banger featuring Ghostface Killah and MF DOOM. This shit is real.
3. While Chinatown Wars is top-down, it really feels more like the 3D GTA games than the first few. The camera twists and turns to stay behind you so it's really more of a long-distance third person camera than truly overhead view. From a technical standpoint, I think this is used to deal w/ what would be the lack of draw-distance had the camera been over-the-shoulder. It's a compromise but a good one and it's pretty rare that the camera causes issues where you can't tell what's going on.
4. You play as Huang Lee who just arrived Liberty City, which is the series's take on NYC, from some unspecified location in China. Huang's father was recently murdered and Huang's out for revenge even though he doesn't really much seem to care about his family or family business.
5. Your strategy is essentially to play both sides against he middle until you find the perpetrator of your father's killing--only there's like five sides to the complex organized crime rivalries in Liberty City. Throughout all this nobody seems to know or care too much that you do outside of your immediate relationship to them. You can show up to their hideout w/ a police tail immediately after assisting their rivals and nobody much cares if you do what they ask.
7. This is all fairly improbable but it actually works w/ the wacky logic that pervades the GTA
universe. This is a series of games where you can often get away w/
gunning down civilians in a public park but police will engage you in a
high speed chase if you fail to pay a toll. It wears its lack of realism
on its sleeve.
7. The story is presented through stylish comic book panels and dialog is delivered via text w/o any voice acting, which is fine by me. Though Chinatown Wars's cast of ethnic crime bosses, corrupt cops
and assorted crime drama standbys generally play it straight, you always
get the sense that Huang is completely aware of the absurdity of the situation and his wry sense of humor gives you the impression he is in on the joke w/ you.
8. The main game menu, where you access the map and get incoming missions, is on a PDA rather than a smartphone. I'd say this is a funny quirk of the times but Chinatown Wars
was released two years after the first iPhone and a decade after the
first BlackBerry so using a PDA was a bit anachronistic even then.
9. The missions don't have checkpoints. Most missions ramp up in difficulty as they go along so this means you'll likely spend an awful lot of time replaying the least interesting parts of the game over and over. You do get to skip the occasional driving section and every now and again some trivial part of the mission gets left out on replays but having to repeatedly redo boring shit remains an problem from the beginning of Chinatown Wars until the end.
10. The theme song never reappears after the intro but Chinatown Wars's soundtrack stays solid throughout. It provides a fairly diverse array of contemporary music styles, often licensed from popular artists. (The PSP version has more licensed music than the DS one if you are concerned w/ such things.) You can switch the radio station using the main game menu but music seems to be custom picked for your current mission so I generally chose to just let whatever the game chooses for me rip.
11. In addition to your standard mucking about w/ firearms and stolen vehicles, there are a bunch of mini-games you have to do when you do things like hot wire a car or plant explosives. I say "have to do" because they are no fun at all. They are also clearly designed for the DS touchscreen so they really feel forced into the PSP version as well.
12. GTA has always been central to the controversy surrounding violence in video games. This time round a drug dealing mini-game was the subject of public ire, dealing drugs being such a great crime compared to killing hundreds of human beings. What a country!
13. Whether you actually play through the story or just like to get in a vehicle and mow down pedestrians, Chinatown Wars will give you what you want out of a GTA game. It actually replicates the full-blown versions to a fault including the fact that the missions get all samey halfway through and the mid-game really drags. I have to give Rockstar credit for this one.They changed how their 3D games looked but not really how they played. This is a really well-done handheld adaptation of a big series and a good game in general.
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