Earlier this year Take 2 released Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on the DS to great critical acclaim but lackluster sales. And so GTA comes back to the PSP, its handheld home, in the form of Chinatown Wars PSP – an upscaled port of the DS game. It’s not different enough an experience from the DS one that I can recommend buying it as well as that one, but for those who missed it I can recommend Chinatown Wars on the PSP with the same qualifications as before: this is a morally bankrupt game in which you take on the role of a hired thug doing any and every crime you can think of. But it’s also fun.

Chinatown Wars takes place is a superbly crafted Liberty City. It’s the same size as before, but it’s definitely nicer to look at and has better ambience because Rockstar have taken full advantage of the PSP’s strengths: graphics power and storage capacity. While the camera is still locked in a top-down mode, the graphics power of the PSP means everything is rendered in 3D, including characters, and everything has higher resolution textures. The higher storage capacity also means more music is available – and music has always played a big part in creating GTA’s unique personality.

Quick recap: do bad stuff

Let’s quickly recap the basic scenario: you are Huang, son of a Triad boss in Liberty City, and your father has just been killed. You’re sent from China with a sword to deliver to your uncle, Wu Kenny, but upon arrival at the Liberty City airport some goons jump you, steal the sword and leave you for dead. You escape with your life and make contact with your uncle who provides you with a safehouse to rest in. It’s your task to avenge your father’s death and recapture the sword, which means getting in the thick of gangs, drugs, organized crime and being generally destructive.

Thankfully Rockstar have not gone and recorded voice actors or changed the comic-book still-image cut-scenes used to tell the story of the game. In the beginning Wu Kenny gives you some odd jobs to help him curry favour with the Triad boss, and these missions are relayed to you by a short conversation followed by on-the-fly instructions. The game elements are introduced to you as you play each mission, so there are very little boring tutorial bits. You soon start working for other people around the city (which is very easily navigated with the help of your trusty GPS) who contact you via emails, and soon enough you’re in the thick of carjacking, turf wars, drug dealing, safehouse purchasing and a huge variety of generally highly criminal activities.

Every game system is top notch and almost completely natural – emerging from the nature of Liberty City. Trading drugs involves finding drug dealers around the city and buying high and selling high, taking advantage of special offers when they’re on. Weapon purchasing is done via a mail-order system that drops the weapons off at your nearest safehouse a few minutes after ordering, and as you play more and more weapons become available. Being chased by cops is exhilarating and fun as you try to run them all off the road and so shake them off your tail. You can even hijack a taxi and start taking fares around Liberty City, earning money if you get them to their destination quickly enough. Meanwhile there are also the scripted missions if you feel like something else to do.

No touchy, unfortunately

While this PSP version offers a lot that the DS doesn’t in terms of graphics and music, it does suffer a little in other areas. Load times are much longer and this can be a little annoying, especially when you just want to read your latest email and have to wait for that to load up, but this probably won’t bother anyone who hasn’t played the DS game. The lack of a touch screen also hurts – the GPS system, the “online” weapon purchasing system and the email systems were all originally designed for use with a touch screen, and the D-pad and buttons just don’t feel quite as intuitive. Rockstar have managed to translate certain touch screen portions really effectively, such as the hotwiring of cars which feels just as satisfying with the analogue stick and buttons, but these were just interesting diversions anyway.

I’ve mentioned the variety in the game already but when talking about Chinatown Wars this can’t be overstated. Yes, you drive a lot – just about everything you do involves driving around the town, but other than that the variety is phenomenal. There are no “stock” missions: every mission is something different. For one you might follow a person on foot, for another you might blow up a building with Molotov cocktails, for another you might set up a sniping position on a building and take down your mark, for another you’ll chase a goon through the streets in a high speed car chase, complete with cops after you both. If you fail a mission you have to repeat it from the beginning, but this is ok because you’ll go straight back to the start of the mission (no driving required), the missions are never very long and with enough preparation in the form of weaponry and armaments you shouldn’t have too much trouble with any of them.

Variety, variety and more variety

Let me briefly mention what else there is too, besides missions: this is a big game (or, more correctly, it’s as big as you want it to be). The missions will take over 10 hours if you focus on them, but instead you could spend your days trying to find all the drug dealers, dealing in drugs, joining in some street races, going on rampages where you get points for blowing stuff up, playing the scratch cards, buying real-estate (this is actually necessary if you don’t want to go all the way across town just to save or stash your drugs), replaying missions you liked, destroying the 100 CCTV cameras scattered around the city, ramping through 30 different billboards, taking taxi passengers, driving the ambulance, hijacking the ammunition delivery truck, hijacking rival gangs’ trucks to steal some drugs, breaking into rival gangs’ compounds, or generally just causing casual mayhem and trying to escape the cops. That’s not an exhaustive list, and it leaves out the local and online multiplayer components too.

In a word, GTA: Chinatown Wars is a top-quality game. If you’re drawn to this game’s theme, or at least not put off by it, you’ll find a highly atmospheric playground in Liberty City for just about any criminal activity you can think of that involves cars and guns. For my part I admire what Rockstar does – the quality of game design and their technical prowess, and I can even enjoy the gameplay in spite of its sordid scenario.

Purchase: