Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars imagines a strange kind of dystopia. One where assault rifles can be ordered online, and are home delivered to your doorstep. One where bystanders and pedestrians meet random acts of senseless violence with nothing more than a shrug. One where the police themselves commit random violence whenever provoked to.
The cartoony, cel-shaded Liberty City of GTA’s first outing into the Nintendo DS isn’t the sprawling, photo-realistic metropolis last seen in GTA IV. Instead, it’s a remarkably detailed but unabashedly fun return to the series’ roots: an arcadey, action-heavy adventure that demonstrates a rare mastery of what makes the DS so special amongst gaming platforms.
It’s neither a ‘watered-down’ GTA running on inferior hardware, nor a ‘GTA for kids.’ For better or for worse, the violence and profanity and questionable content are all intact, and the amount of gameplay content here, both in breadth and variety, will satisfy even the most cynical hardcore gamer.
You play Huang Lee, a wise-cracking, borderline apathetic 25 year-old charged with returning a priceless family heirloom to the Triad bosses in Liberty City. Needless to say, things go a bit awry, other things explode and the heirloom disappears, plunging the reluctant Huang into the vagaries of the local mafia gangs.
Like the early GTAs, it’s played from a top down, almost isometric perspective. The game world is represented on the top screen, while the bottom holds your PDA and GPS devices. The D-pad controls driving, and there’s thankfully no gratuitous use of the touch screen just because, you know, its there. Apart from a bizarre method for flinging grenades (involving a tricky flick with the stylus), the controls are pretty spot-on, and respond smoothly.
Owing to hardware constraints, there is no fancy pants voice acting, or full motion video, and frankly, they’re not missed. The graphic novel-esque cutscenes suffice, and the instrumental-only radio stations never grate.
The missions themselves, delivered in trademark GTA bite-size chunks, are mostly wonderful, and include some brilliant little uses of the touch screen, like flinging change into the tollbooth as you drive by, or tapping the screen to resuscitate a terminally ill mobster as you cart his ambulance around town, chased by the cops. The missions sometimes break into little minigames a la Warioware, like sabotaging a rival’s race car by pounding his engine with wrenches and hammers, or defusing bombs by carefully cutting the right wire.
There’s plenty to keep you occupied: just ploughing through the main storyline will squeeze at least seven to eight hours of gameplay, and there’s the addictive drug-dealing sidegame, bonus missions, hidden cars, and other fine distractions to stretch that further.
The flaws are mostly content-related, something that’s beyond the scope of this review. Technically, the game is mostly bug-free: the framerate chugs sometimes, and there are minor camera issues, but nothing game-stopping. The plot also chugs a bit mid-game, sometimes giving you only a single choice of mission to complete. But let us face it; Chinatown Wars is a remarkable achievement in scale and depth for a platform long maligned for its apparent technical weaknesses and ‘kiddish’ games. And please, let’s not call it the arrival of ‘mature content’ on the DS. Maturity in content demonstrates either a crafted nuance in dealing with a particular subject matter, or a strong position articulated through sharp satire. Chinatown Wars is neither. It’s awfully juvenile, self-aware and shamelessly fun. But who’d want it any other way?
—krish.raghav@gmail.com