Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

From the days when GTA honed a 2D top-down visage to its current 3D third-person avatar, the series has seen its share of both - evolution as well as devolution. After regressing back into its top-down womb, the series makes its debut on the Nintendo DS with ‘Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars’.

Chinatown Wars takes place in the series’ fictional hub populated with the most GTA tales to date - Liberty City. To keep things fresh, the storyline doesn’t intersect those in previous iterations, and the game hosts a cast that’s new to boot. You step into the expensive shoes of ‘Huang Lee’, the spoiled son of a recently murdered Triad Boss. He’s given a pretty simple task - to deliver his family heirloom, which is a sword named ‘Yu Jian’, to his gangster uncle Wu “Kenny” Lee. As soon as he hits the airport, Huang’s crew’s hit by a group of thugs who kill his escorts and leave him for dead. What follows is a series of missions to help uncle Kenny recover the sword, trace your father’s killers (since you’re hell bent on avenging his death) and help him in all the shady operations he has running.

The playground offered is incredibly reminiscent of the first two GTA games (owed to the top-down view), but with the detail and scale of GTA 3 and 4 (to an extent). The game manages juice all it can from the DS where both visuals and the game’s scale’s concerned. The little beast gives you access to two of four islands of Liberty City, each brimming with more life around any corner than you could hope for. The game world’s beautifully designed, rendered and littered with details.

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Be it the bright red dumpsters lining the edge of a gloomy building or a orange and yellow canopy that hovers above a hotdog stand, the game’s a visual treat with its vivid color palette that plays with contrasting colors and cel-shaded style that leaves a lasting impression. I love the way even the little things boast of intricate details - when it rains, little umbrellas prop up over walking pedestrians, when you run over a dustbin or a derelict carton that litters the streets, puffs of wasted paper flutter in your wake. It all comes together in the most wanderlust-inspiring way, which is a truly big plus for a sand-box game where exploration plays such a vital role. And then there’s the obvious - the game looks brilliant on every level and runs as smooth as noodles off a chopstick.__STARTQUOTE__When you try to steal a ride, the touch-screen’s used to hot-wire the car, and depending on the how old the car is, you get simple locks (that you can use a screw-driver to start-up), slightly more complicated locks that require you to hotwire manually, and electronic number locks, which require you to time your clicks to get a certain numeric code in from a series of spinning wheels.__ENDQUOTE__

Rockstar’s done a tremendous job with Chinatown’s Gameplay too. The control’s designs are ingenious - they’ve used the touch-screen as a fully functionally PDA with everything from GPS to e-mail access, which is one up on the series previous pager/cell phone. When you try to steal a ride, the touch-screen’s used to hot-wire the car, and depending on the how old the car is, you get simple locks (that you can use a screw-driver to start-up), slightly more complicated locks that require you to hotwire manually, and electronic number locks, which require you to time your clicks to get a certain numeric code in from a series of spinning wheels. If you don’t hotwire the car in time, the car’s alarm kicks in, alerting nearby police patrol vehicles and throwing them in pursuit of you.

Alternately, the touchscreen’s used to do everything from playing a scratch-card minigame which allows you to win cash, to letting you assemble a sniper rifle before an assassination mission! What starts off seeming like an entertaining gimmick, quickly proves itself to be a really well though-of and designed core-feature of Chinatown Wars’ gameplay.

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You control the movement of Huang and you drive around using the D-pad and face buttons. The cars controls are really responsive, and the game assists you re-align your ride with a road after those steep turns, making it really easy to dodge traffic and ram into cop cars. Speaking of which, unlike previous games where could find a quite spot to take a nap while your ‘wanted level’ cools off, in Chinatown Wars you’ll have to earn your freedom. The game’s littered with cop cars, so sneaking past them is not an option. If you wish to lose the heat, you’ve got to ram into and disable cop cars, making it much more of a challenge to make it through those intense cop-chases.

It can become really frustrating at times though, since the cop cars are extremely persistent (and fast) and the damn cops have huge fists full of talons instead of hands. They use these deadly talons to latch onto your car and pull you out mercilessly, busting your ass, even while your car’s spinning all over the place wildly. The only way to get rid of these suicidal cops is to drive straight and really fast. Getting busted during a long, multi-objective mission can be extremely frustrating, especially if you’re on the last part of mission and one of these cops from hell latch on and pull you out of your ride, even while your car’s far from stationary. The game’s checkpoint system fails miserably at such times; it would be great if they could incorporate one that saves your progress after every objective in multi-layered missions.__STARTQUOTE__Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is one of the rare breed of games that excels in both design and implementation, while giving you access to a plethora of content. It’s without a doubt, a must-buy for DS owners; in fact, it pushes the series forward where innovation and ingenuinity are concerned, far more than GTA IV ever could__ENDQUOTE__

To sum up, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is one of the rare breed of games that excels in both design and implementation, while giving you access to a plethora of content. It’s without a doubt, a must-buy for DS owners; in fact, it pushes the series forward where innovation and ingenuinity are concerned, far more than GTA IV ever could (yes, Chinatown Wars is better than GTA IV, which wasn’t that great a game anyway). However, just like with its brethren, its gameplay and checkpoint system leaves a lot to be desired; but that’s in no way a reason to not dish out the Rs.1,699 it costs, to buy the game (which is available locally, by the way) for your beloved Nintendo DS.