Reviews// GTA: Chinatown Wars PSP

Thankfully losing the police is a more fun in CTW. Gone is driving out of their line of sight and in comes the job of having to wipe them out by crashing in to or causing them to crash in to the scenery with the amount of cops on your tail dependant on your wanted level.

My biggest issue with CTW was that while the core gameplay and story were as good as you come to expect from a GTA game, I couldn’t help wishing I was playing it on a DS. On the Nintendo machine the mini-games were considered an innovation; drawing tattoos, hotwiring cars and other funny business was fun with the touchscreen and stylus, but on the PSP they can be annoyances.

That said, making Molotov cocktails at the petrol station (by moving the dripping hose over empty bottles) is a novel way of obtaining a weapon and breaking a safe by rotating the thumb-stick and pressing X button did resemble the task at hand. However, other jobs didn’t feel suited to the PSP. Breaking into low-end cars is done by turning the thumb-stick on each screw under the steering column and then pressing R and L to cross the wires – fine if you’re doing some leisurely thieving but an inconvenience if the cops are after you.

Even though CTW might feel like it was made for the DS, it has been designed with portability at the forefront regardless of system. Missions are relatively short and the jobs that involve you driving half way across the island to get to are more repayable thanks to the option of skipping the driving segment after your first attempt.

Combat has been an issue with GTA for a while, and CTW does little to remedy it. Lock-on is dubious and I often found myself ditching the firearms and just running at the enemy to lay them out Kung-Fu style instead. On the plus side, there is a flame thrower!

Killing baddies and completing missions are two ways to earn money, but not a lot of it. Huang’s associates appear to have been credit crunched with some missions earning you as little as $50, free drugs or in one case jack all.

Thankfully CTW throws some other options into the mix and the game is better for it. Jobs like taxi driver and tattoo artist aside, drug dealer is the occupation of choice in this game, so much so that the well designed drug dealing element can be more fun than the central story. Buy low, sell high and don’t get busted by the cops – it’s simple but addictive (ironic, isn’t it?). If you frown at selling narcotics you can also win money by playing scratch cards, once again another element that works better on a touch screen but I still found myself spending hundreds of fictional dollars on the little blighters.

SPOnG Score: 85%

Conclusion
Grand Theft Auto: China Town Wars is a bite-size chunk of life in Liberty City that in many ways is more fun than its next-gen relative. If it wasn’t for the recurring thought that I should be playing it on the DS, the PSP version would be worthy of a higher score, instead it highlights the weaknesses of the supposedly more advanced system. It seems strange that a GTA game is better on a console favoured by children and old ladies rather than the brand that brought it prominence all those years ago.